Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have a wide range of applications in the insurance industry, helping to streamline the underwriting and claim processes and improve the customer experience, a Chinese insurer said at the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).
ZhongAn Online Property & Casualty, an online-only insurance company, aims to raise its service quality by using AI for the pricing of products, underwriting, fraud detection and customer services, the South China Morning Post reports.
“Machine learning can optimise the quality of customer service, so the development of AI in the insurance industry will certainly be a big trend,” said Wayne Xu, the company’s chief operating officer.
“At the same time, our young customers are also more comfortable using computer-related services and communication rather than going through phone exchanges.”
Illustrating this point, ZhongAn revealed that a chatbot deals with 97% of its customer queries without any human involvement.
When it comes to medical insurance, ZhongAn believes it can make a better judgement of an applicant’s health through simple man-machine dialogue supported by AI technology, Shanghai Daily reports.
The company also offers protection against a cracked mobile phone screen, with newly developed image recognition technology detecting whether a photograph shows a phone screen that is in good condition or is already cracked. It can also tell if photos have been deliberately altered or photoshopped.
With the development of AI, technologies ranging from natural language processing and computer vision to data mining have been gradually applied in the insurance sector across marketing, underwriting, claim settlement and customer service, helping insurance companies to reduce their operational costs and enhance their business efficiency, said Sun Gufei, head of data intelligence at ZhongAn.
Read more about how advanced technologies and next-generation internet connectivity will impact the financial services sector by downloading Osborne Clarke’s Next-generation connectivity report.
