At a time when many companies worry about AI disintermediating their customer relationships or eliminating roles, Employers decided to lean into the trend and see what it could accomplish by embedding within OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The workers' comp specialist launched a ChatGPT app in April, and it now sees a growing number of daily submissions and quotes come through ChatGPT, according to Chris Champlin, senior vice president of sales and CX for Employers, a unit of Employers Holdings.
Rather than disintermediate Employers, the ChatGPT tool facilitates the conversations it has with potential clients.
"If [customers are] using AI, they're understanding how much they don't know and how much they do need an agent," Champlin said during a panel discussion at the Zywave Horizon conference in New York this week. "Business owners know what their limits are as far as handling their insurance needs, so AI is just pointing them to their need for agents more so than anything."
There's no question that many customers, regardless of the type of insurance they need, are doing their research first on ChatGPT and similar large language models. For example, J.D. Power found that
But that trust goes only so far. A study by Smart Communications found that for insurance, users'
In an environment where clients gravitate toward AI but don't trust it fully, ChatGPT is not acting as a disintermediary but as a facilitator of the human conversations that happen in insurance, according to Jason Bartow, executive vice president for commercial lines at Bartow Insurance, on the same panel.
"Sometimes a little bit of knowledge is dangerous because people can go onto ChatGPT, know a few things, and that replaces all of the years of my licensing and designations and all the classes that I've taken to make sure that I know insurance as best as I can, right?" Bartow said.
But without that avenue for research, Bartow said he worries that he'll need to talk down to the insured or find himself discussing a concept beyond their understanding.
With ChatGPT in the mix, "if anything, they can now understand if I speak insurance-ese or legalese," Bartow said. "We can hold a conversation on the same level."
Making the connection with APIs
Employers had already built the groundwork for its ChatGPT integration years ago, having developed application programming interfaces (APIs) in 2017 to integrate with distribution partners including retailers, wholesalers and payroll providers. Today it has 50 to 60 such integrations, and the same APIs enabled it to quickly connect to ChatGPT, Champlin said.
Other carriers can easily build the same sort of ChatGPT app if they have this groundwork done, but a lot will depend on their existing technology. "The APIs aren't the hard part, it's plugging those into legacy systems," Champlin said. Employers, a 113-year-old company, built these capabilities iteratively, he said.
The Employers ChatGPT app requests data such as the company's name, business type, location, employee count, years of operation and payroll. Simply knowing what data the customer is willing to share with ChatGPT, or has on hand, helps Employers start building the relationship, Champlin said in an interview.
"We can give an indicative quote after six pieces of data, so then from there they transition to a full quoting environment," Champlin said. "It's still not a lot of questions but then they have to give their FEIN number, they have to give more details about their risk and exposure."
Although the number of daily ChatGPT interactions is growing, Champlin said the goal is not to get a "landslide" of direct business through that channel.
"That's not the intent, and that's not what we're seeing," Champlin said. "I don't think we will see that because the customers want to talk with experts. They might see it and use it as information to go to their current agent."
Employers expects that the growing comfort with AI is going to be key to getting new business from a younger generation of customers who prefer self-service and aren't put off by answering questions from a ChatGPT app.
"A lot of small-business owners are now in their 20s," Champlin said. "They're used to it."
