How is emerging tech changing insurance?

November 5, 2024 3:49 PM

An illuminated AI sign in an exhibit hall at All In in Montreal in September 2023 — An illuminated AI sign during the All In event in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023. The event aims to connect people to real-life applications of Canadian AI in business, research and ethical pursuits.

Elad Tsur, former CEO and co-founder of Planck, acquired by Applied Systems, shared his thoughts on the future of AI and the insurance industry with Digital Insurance at ITC Vegas 2024.

What are your predictions on emerging technologies in the underwriting process and overall in the insurance industry?

AI is everywhere, from simple tools that will help to improve efficiency, all the way to customer-facing processes. From an AI deployment perspective, 2026 will be closer to 2027 than to 2025--meaning we're going to see a dramatic increase in use of AI in next year, but the year afterwards, deployment will be way, way, way bigger… Next year, carriers will be adopting AI way more than they have so far. And again, even that would be neglectful compared to what they will have in 2026.

In terms of underwriting, we'll see most of the usages around reducing expense ratios and not so much in reducing the loss ratios. You're going to see lots of pressure on the efficiency of the process, and despite the potential of AI to help the loss ratios way more in value compared to the expense ratios, you're going to see the first products integrated and adopted in the expense ratios.

But I think that even more than that, you're going to see products in changing the ease of use of insurance, changing the interface. There are products that are customer facing to make it seem very innovative or cool to the market, not necessarily bringing actual value to the carrier, besides maybe more customers. There is lots of value there, but the bigger impact on carriers will be improving expense ratios, and maybe four to five years from now, that will also include using AI in loss ratios.

How does insurance compare to other industries in GenAI adoption? Where are there opportunities for innovation?

Insurance is very late to adopt, definitely. I'm not complaining, and I'm not judging. I think, on the contrary, I think that actually the insurance business needs to be risk averse, and the fact that they're cautious about adopting any technology that might impact the bottom line is healthy for the industry, in which the sole purpose of it is the ability to correctly assess the level of risk and taking that risk on… The customer facing is usually agents, and not the carriers themselves…

I think that being the back-end and not front-end to the customer, the insured, is something that made it possible for the industry not to adopt AI that fast, with customer-facing, because we're starting to expect that from them. So brokers will be adopting AI faster, that is also my prediction.

Another trend we'll see– you used to only see brokers that care about writing business, and carriers care about underwriting the business and about their risk selection, and brokers didn't care about risk selection, they weren't doing that. Now we see more and more brokers doing risk selection. There were some carriers, very innovative ones, incentivizing brokers to do risk selection activity… You see more and more brokers that are doing risk selection, and the fact that they will be adopting AI, not just to improve their internal processes and not just to have better interactions with customers, but also to do risk election, I think is very interesting, especially Planck for and for what I've seen in the past eight years.

How are skill sets changing? Are we seeing a really big shift there?

The responsibility of every single role will be more tailored to emotional intelligence (EQ) … Analytics, looking at data, doing calculations and then matching records will be automated by AI, because intelligence is cheap these days, that's the answer.

The AI will be more intelligent than what we are, and I think most of the responsibilities of almost any role in the industry, will shift it more towards the emotional and the more human level, because the machines can do the mundane, boring tasks of matching data and reconciling data, making calculations, typing, and storing information.

I think that bringing the human part to the discussion, to an interaction is something that, let's say probably 15 years from now, AI will be able to do that as well, but I think that it will not be at that same level as us for the next decade. And I think that this is why all of the roles will be focused more on the human side than on the digital side or on the boring, mundane tasks that you definitely would want the machine to do.

How would that impact new talent just coming into the industry? What are your thoughts on the fear or anxiety of emerging talent towards AI or new tech?

I would be stressed about it. You're building your career, you want to know what to focus on in building the foundations to your career and we've never had technology that can think, that has intelligence and will surpass our level of intelligence. Why would an employer hire a human being, if the employer can hire an AI?

But to replace the whole human being takes more than just their level of intelligence. It will take a while to see AI completely replace us… I don't think [new talent] should be that anxious about it, but they should realize that they will need to be a bit agile in their career…I would focus on trying to increase my EQ skills and my IT skills.