As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand and widen across the industry, there has always been a growing concern surrounding how the technology may impact jobs within sectors, however, according to Richard Hartley, the CEO and Co-founder of Cytora, the technology should wind up creating more jobs across the industry.
During a recent interview with Reinsurance News, Hartley stated that AI will enable the re/insurance industry “to become larger and more impactful on a global basis.”
“The technology will create capacity in the existing teams within the re/insurance industry to do more, which will ultimately generate more value for customers and more profit for the industry.”
Moving forward, Hartley reflects on how important it is that organisations ensure that their talent receive training and remain up-to-date with AI as it continues to expand across the sector.
“One of the unusual aspects of large language models (LLM) is that people across the world are using them in their day-to-day lives.
“They use it to summarize information or provide answers to questions they have and I would expect that to be an indication of widespread adoption across the re/insurance industry in the business context.
“The reason it is asymmetrically valuable in insurance is simply insurance is so interpretive. Insurance is about understanding dense heterogeneous information and then unpicking hard to identify insights.
“That process can take a long time, there’s a lot of reading, interpretation and synthesis involved and an inherent lack of standardisation. But by using AI, the technology will reveal the areas that you need to focus on, and as a result, something that would take you four hours usually to complete will only take around 20 minutes.”
As the industry continues to experiment with AI, one major formation of the technology that has begun to expand across the sector is Generative AI which is used for streamlining tasks and generating risk insights.
Hartley addresses whether he sees Generative AI being more of a positive or a negative factor within the industry.
“I think it is an absolute positive for the industry and it really is a broad renaissance in terms of what is now achievable and possible. So much of the insurance value chain is analogue, clients compile and write risk information, they send that to brokers who then read it and compile the information too, they then write to insurers, and all that is very analogue.
“So if you look at the generative aspects of generative AI, such as how it can digitize risk data and then synthesise and produce risk insight, then streamline decisioning, all of that analogue process can be done in a much more streamlined and ultimately automated way. That is a huge positive for the industry because it means people can save time and focus on other areas of importance. For example, there are many risk verticals that are underserved and underinsured where new products can be developed, ultimately expanding the overall size of the industry.”
Further, Hartley addresses that while the re/insurance sector has been using AI for a number of years, the overall amount of time it has taken to train the AI-powered models has been very long, which has resulted in platforms taking a long time to go live, as well as getting them scaled across different countries and different lines of business.
However, with generative AI, “the training time is so much lower, and in many areas does not require any training, which as a result, makes the scalability of AI so much higher,” Hartley states. For large insurers that are globally distributed with hundreds of different product lines this unlocks transformative business value.
“I think re/insurance companies have been quick to see the opportunity in large language models (LLMs) and are accelerating from POCs into production usage and really materializing value from that.”
