Artificial intelligence: A 2020 Digital Insurance hot topic

December 29, 2020 2:36 PM

di-server-stock-052220 — Cables connect server racks at the 5G lab at the Vodafone Kabel Deutschland GmbH campus in Duesseldorf, Germany, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. The European Union wont explicitly ban Huawei Technologies Co. or other 5G equipment vendors when the bloc unveils guidelines for member states to mitigate security risks. Photographer: Wolfram Schroll/Bloomberg

The year 2020 was unquestionably defined by the coronavirus pandemic and every industry, including insurance's, response to it. Our year-end hot topic series, starting here with artificial intelligence, is meant to raise the profile of some of the other areas where the industry made advancements this year, both in response to and in spite of COVID-19's impact.

Travelers gets into item insurance with insurtech Pineapple

A technology incubator investment is netting Travelers new AI-driven image recognition innovation for its Traverse personal property and liability insurance product. By partnering with South African start-up Pineapple, Travelers has added the technology to further streamline customer experiences, including for Traverse’s recent expansion into Texas.

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Destination AI: Augmented automated underwriting and life insurance

It may not fully employ the language of disruption that runs through the wider fintech market, but a quiet tech evolution has been taking place in insurance nonetheless. Case in point: the advent of automated underwriting facilitated by more advanced algorithms and data analysis. Where insurtech does overlap with its more vocal fintech counterparts is in the greater use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to solve age-old problems around data analysis and interpretation.

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Man vs. machine? How automated machine learning will evolve actuaries

Gort. The Terminator. Wall-E. HAL 9000 … and AutoML? Popular images of artificial intelligence can terrify, inspire, and amuse us – but the real thing, AutoML (automated machine learning or AML), often just confounds us. AML doesn’t walk. It doesn’t talk (necessarily). But this form of software is so smart that it can teach itself to code, and it could enable insurers to automate tasks in fields as diverse as fraud investigation, valuation, and lapse detection. For some, this outcome sounds terrifying. For others, it’s exciting. But for many, it simply confuses.

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How insurtech is powering wildfire response

As wildfires continue to scorch sections of the country, start-up insurtechs and existing tech companies have been working to develop tech innovations addressing extreme-weather disasters. Investors have stepped in to fund emerging efforts around cleantech, a term used broadly to describe technology seeking to manage human impact on the environment. While hopeful, the technology can take years to prove and even longer to convince traditional utilities and government agencies to adopt.

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3 ways AI can transform auto insurance customer experience

The good news is that insights from AI can help close the customer experience gap by providing auto insurance carriers with the ability to generate personalized touchpoints in real time, without hindering drivers’ privacy. In order to reap the ultimate benefits from AI for customer experience, carriers can invest in deriving these data-driven insights at key points of care, such as following a car accident or a minor fender bender. Here’s how I imagine it could work:

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