The fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) mindset that has plagued business technology since its inception is still clouding the mindset of many professionals as we are well into the generative AI era. However, the mindset is shifting across the workforce and there is data to back up the positive impact and rapid adoption of generative AI in the workplace.
According to the latest Microsoft Work Trend Index Report, “75% of people are already using AI at work and 46% of them started using it less than 6 months ago.”
Further, the report states, “Within the next five years, 41% of these leaders – leaders who are “extremely familiar” with AI – expect to redesign business processes from the ground up with AI. In the same time frame, they anticipate orchestrating (38%) and training a team of AI bots (42%), and ensuring the ethical use of AI (47%) will be a core part of their job.”
The trend of AI continuing to weave its way throughout the workplace will not only continue but will accelerate as will the excitement of people using AI to transform how they work. Sasha Sanyal, Microsoft Global Insurance Leader, shared in June 2023 the excitement in the insurance industry when he said, “We are seeing an unprecedented level of interest in AI technology that we’re seeing now around generative AI, which I generally define as a system for generating text, images, or code in response to user input or prompts, drawing on vast sets of data. Our customers are asking: What can it do for us now? What are the best use cases? How do we get started?”
The AI Potential for Insurers
Fast forward to October 2023 and the excitement shared by Sanyal in June about generative AI turned into potential areas of traction for insurers.
- Helping deliver meaningful and engaging customer experiences
- Generative AI can impact several phases throughout the journey for insurance customers such the discovering and exploring phase, buying and using phase, asking phase, and engaging phase.
- Driving efficiencies in corporate functions
- Generative AI can potentially impact people’s flow of work in insurance across different teams such as Contact Centers, Human Resources, Legal, and Marketing.
- Creating Copilots for each phase of the insurance life cycle
- Generative AI use cases for custom copilots are being explored by insurers to help with different complex activities such as:
- Copilots to assist customers with finding details about services and policies.
- Copilots to assist underwriters adjust decision-making needs by automatically summarizing policy documents and applications.
- Copilots to assist claim examiners for filing evaluations, settlement processes, data extraction from documents, and data entry.
- Copilots to assist actuaries to spot trends and automate their tasks.
- Generative AI use cases for custom copilots are being explored by insurers to help with different complex activities such as:
In addition to these potential areas, Microsoft discovered other possible scenarios through engagements with customers such as “the potential of content generation to write automatic responses to customer inquiries, of summarization to assist in producing support conversion logs or financial reports, of semantic search to enable fast information discovery and knowledge mining, and code generation to convert natural language to structured query language (SQL) (or vice versa) for telemetry data.”
What I appreciate about all of this is that use cases are being explored beyond the typical “insurance things” that most people think of. If you peel back the layers of an insurance company, you will see that it’s comprised of a multi-layered, multi-faceted organization that has needs that can be found within many companies outside of insurance.
Further, exploring possibilities opens up dialogue across a company and forces people to have straightforward conversations about data, processes, systems, skills, and resources – all of which can, and are, being transformed by AI.
The AI Reality for Insurers
Turning the potential into reality requires a fundamental shift in work patterns and mindset that must be championed throughout an organization – and the shift is already happening! The people that are empowered with AI solutions are using the tools in several ways.
- 56% use AI to catch up on missed meetings,
- +51% to analyze information,
- +49% to design visual content,
- +49% to interact with customers,
- +37% to brainstorm or problem-solve.
- 66% more likely to redesign their business processes and workflows with AI.
Other empowerment stats emerged around AI power users as “61% more likely to hear from their CEO about the importance of using generative AI at work; 53% more likely to receive encouragement from leadership to consider how AI can transform their function; 37% more likely to say their company has a virtual learning program.”
According to Sheila Jordan, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Technology Officer at Honeywell, “To stay ahead of the curve, we’ve made AI training a priority to ensure everyone can leverage the power of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and other AI solutions. We also launched the GenAI Academy, supporting employee growth and development with the aim of increasing ambassadors and GenAI power users across the globe. We are already seeing benefits that are transforming the way we work and innovate.”
Fueled by this mindset and adoption of AI, the insurance industry is now benefiting from the realities of Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is being used by…
- Insurance agents to help customers with options and product summarizations while providing unique, customer-specific reporting capabilities. Additionally, they can be more responsive to customers with tailored emails when questions are specific.
- Employees who process claims to speed up the discussions on settlements, be better equipped to assist policyholders when a loss is first reported, and access policy guidelines and information for claims processing.
- Underwriters when risk factors need to be assessed when providing insurance to customers and gain immediate access to details regarding an application.
- Financial advisors to get insights into changing markets and life events to aid in planning discussions on personal finance.
Closing Thoughts
Any company looking to make the leap from Copilot Potential to Copilot Reality should recognize that the impact of AI is not confined to a specific type of employee generation, but spans all of them. And the stats regarding the use of AI tools at work across generations are astounding:
- 85% Gen Z [18-28]
- 78% Millennials [29-43]
- 76% Gen X [44-57]
- 73% Boomers+ [58+]
The context of these stats paves the way for a better understanding of employee expectations and how they should be part of the AI transformation process. This means there should be clearly defined strategies regarding security, compliance, data, accessibility, governance, and accountability balanced between technical and cultural readiness.
As a final thought, Microsoft has a curated solution for the insurance industry called “Microsoft for insurance” as part of its Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services that I recommend you explore. Lastly, check out “The future of insurance in the era of AI” e-book that’s available.
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