Leaders Predict How AI Will Change the Insurance Industry

What are the key ways that generative AI and large language models will impact and change customer experience in the insurance industry in the near term?

At the 2024 Retiretech event in Las Vegas,  a panel of industry experts discussed how the next wave of AI innovation will reshape customer expectations and experiences in insurance. The panel included moderator Sam Zimmerman, chief operating officer, NCD, and panelists Scott Campbell, senior vice president, American National; Jay Singh, co-founder and CEO, Hedgeness; Sean O’Donoghue FCA, BFP, CISA, chief technology officer, Security Benefit; and Daniel Gremmell, chief data officer, Zinnia.

After spending years focused on building better digital experiences to work around legacy constraints, insurers must now contend with a new disruption — the rapid rise of generative AI and large language models.

In the near term, panelists said they believe gen AI will impact insurance customer experience a few key ways:

1. Hyper-personalization of customer interactions and recommendations, powered by AI that deeply understands the nuances of insurance products and customer needs. Providers will need to train AI on their proprietary product data to deliver this.
2. Deploying AI agents and assistants to augment human advisors and enable them to focus on higher-value, more complex conversations with clients. AI can handle rote queries and allow advisors to serve more clients.
3. Streamlining and automating customer operations, from quoting to underwriting to claims, by combining multiple AI capabilities in the background. Think national language processing (NLP) to interpret requests, machine learning (ML) to process data and determine actions, and natural language generation (NLG) to craft responses.
4. Leveraging multimodal AI (text, voice, image and video) to meet customers in their preferred interaction mode and make experiences more engaging. Virtual human avatars for insurance conversations may not be far off.

While the full vision will take time, forward-leaning insurers are already laying the groundwork by experimenting with AI in contained use cases, quantifying business value and learning through agile iterations. The race is on to harness AI to finally deliver the modern, intuitive experiences that insurance customers and agents deserve.

Paul Tyler (LinkedIn) is the chief marketing officer of Nassau Financial Group.