AI: This is the natural evolution

Forum

By Bhavesh Jas Canhea

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been showing high positive impact in our daily life in many different sectors. Advanced technology and new customers’ demands have accelerated the AI process of adoption and its speed of propagation. The insurance sector is realizing the need of this game-changing concept to radically alter the relation between insurance players and their customers.

Artificial intelligence at work. Photo – innovationatwork.ieee.org

The drivers for the adoption of AI are numerous, but three trends are emerging: first, the adoption of Big Data along with the explosion of multi-format gathered information require finding cost-effective solutions to efficiently make good decision. Second, recent economic pressure has driven organisations to make archaic processes more efficient by minimising the delays and guaranteeing information security in an environment where less human resources are operating. And third, the power needed in terms of AI computation and the ability to follow higher and higher demand has only been reached recently, mostly within cloud architecture.

More specific to the insurance sector, customers’ behaviour and new communication technologies have changed the traditional landscape. Understanding these changes and being able to respond to the new operational and functional needs are too complex to be handled manually, and thus require relying on automated learning rules and patterns from data utilizing Machine Learning approaches.

Also, the new generations of users are more empowered: they were born within a digital environment, they demand high-level customer experience while considering quality as a standard, they use vocal interface, comment quickly on social media, want to be in control while demanding transparency and security, and are supported by strong regulations about privacy and traceability. They are also massively using mobile and cloud to access their professional and personal life on their smartphones, anywhere and at any time. Lastly, they are impatient; they live in an era of instant gratification brought by digital vehicles such as Facebook or Instagram.

Latest innovations in technology and adoption of smart mobile devices have changed in depth the way documents are captured, read and analysed. Since tablets and smartphones have cameras, they become part of the document management process, at the same level of smart and connected scanners. AI concepts and mostly Deep Neural Networks (DNN) along with piloted scanning, document classification, automatic data extraction and data validation are done today almost entirely at the device level, with the absence of or very little human intervention. DNN ensures more than 99% of automated recognition of complex documents, such as handwritten ones, mobile snaps, barcodes, multi-formats, multi-language, low quality pictures, unstructured and unconstrained documents. However, integrating all AI and DNN features into the claim processing may easily reduce by 70% the overall handling time, reduce financial costs and dramatically increase customer satisfaction.

Artificial Intelligence, including behavioural intelligence, secured and proven capture of documents, automatic reading, classification and extraction of data independently from language and formats, supported by attended RPA and DMS, can only grow in importance and capability

Finally, leaving a large part of the processing to Artificial Intelligence will free staff from unnecessary manual tasks and validations, and develop human intelligent interactions.

This is not a revolution, this is a natural evolution.

Bhavesh Jas Canhea is a Software Developer at Swan Mauritius

* Published in print edition on 11 September 2020