7 African companies using tech to innovate insurance for the masses

Figure 6 shows the contact centre agent, client, and administrator as the actors for the WhatsApp use case. The functions within the use case are policy schedule, confirmation of cover, border letter, and the home agent. There’s no doubt the benefits outweigh the additional work of developing a robust AI protocol. By putting in place stringent guardrails, the insurance industry will reap the rewards of AI while remaining compliant within a quickly evolving regulatory landscape. Woebot is used primarily through Facebook Messenger as an artificially intelligent chatbot trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most widely known methods of treating depression.

• Also, few requirements engineers/analysts have expertise in the areas of identifying, analysing, specifying, and managing security requirements47,48.
• Achieving more precise estimates could reveal frequently overlooked risk factors, including structural weaknesses, damage from environmental forces, and the potential for collapse.
• Developed by Dreamtonics, SynthesizerV is a cutting-edge synthesis software that accurately simulates the intricacies of human singing.
• Data using Woebot, she says, has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
• Marketers can easily generate high-quality copy, images, and videos based on a single brief, which enables them to quickly produce consistent and engaging content for entire campaigns, enhancing brand messaging and audience engagement.
• The survey aimed to determine the average degree of acceptance of chatbots for contacting the insurer to take action such as claim reporting.

The platform includes a large collection of music made by in-house artists, which guarantees originality and copyright safety. HookSound’s AI Studio analyzes your video’s mood, color scheme, and other visual characteristics to create precisely matched music tracks. This integration simplifies the content creation process, allowing content creators to improve their work with professional-grade background music.

RaShawn Mitchner is a MarketWatch Guides team senior editor covering personal finance topics and insurance. She’s spent over a decade writing and editing articles about how to save money on travel, entertainment, household services and more. Brogan Woodburn is a seasoned automotive writer who specializes in auto insurance, shipping, warranties and loans. He’s based in Prineville, Ore., where he enjoys playing guitar and hiking in the high desert. Discover the critical processes, strategies, and best-practices that allow established companies to adopt AI successfully, and generate an ROI.

Rates for car insurance are traditionally determined by a buyer’s personal factors, such as credit score, income, education level, occupation, and marital and homeowner status. But these factors penalize low-income buyers and aren’t directly related to a driver’s likelihood of getting into collisions. Companies using AI to build models can reduce these biases by actively excluding these factors during the training process. These companies are using artificial intelligence to shake up the insurance industry. If there is a brief gap in a conversation, the chatbot has to begin all over again.

Bain & Company

With respect to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, it turns out that androids, or at least their early forerunners, might dream of electric sheep. AI can hallucinate, an eerily human term that describes instances in which an AI system simply makes up information. Made up or false information, particularly when used in clinical decision making, can cause patient harm. These possibilities are dizzying in their number and potential, but they are not without the shadow of possible harm. The kind of radical change AI promises to bring to health care is messy, and patient lives hang in the balance. The nature of GPT artificial intelligence, however, has the potential to change the incentives to become more customer-friendly.

In addition to chatbots, banks use AI to help recommend products for customers and manage money. With ongoing high interest rates, the 2023 banking crisis, and continued pressure on borrowers, shares of Upstart have come crashing down as its growth has stalled. But that’s no reason to doubt the underlying AI technology behind this business, as AI and machine-learning algorithms are designed to make inferences and judgments using insurance chatbot examples large amounts of data. This opens up the possibility of launching assistants in narrower areas where data is cleaner, without having to overhaul the master data across the entire enterprise to achieve an AI result. EWeek has the latest technology news and analysis, buying guides, and product reviews for IT professionals and technology buyers. The site’s focus is on innovative solutions and covering in-depth technical content.

Hybrid chatbots

Automating claims has fundamentally changed the way claims are submitted and also how customers are paid out, and parametric insurance solutions like automatic flight delay payments are a fine example of this. Shift claim that their software is 250 per cent better at fraud detection than the industry standard. Agile methodology should enable frontline claims teams to see a customer’s entire claims and medical assistance profile on a single platform. This will help them ‘join the dots’ of the customer’s information and calculate the most suitable support and solutions. By doing this, you’re setting the stage for the chatbot, instructing it to focus on insurance-related customer support. In this tutorial, we’ll show you an alternative way to set up your chatbot, which is particularly useful if you’re not using OpenAI.

Trust is also a key factor in chatbot acceptance by consumers in B2C relationships (Brachten et al., 2021). We found that this influence comes not only from its impact on attitude but also from its mediation by PEOU and PU. The data are derived from a structured questionnaire that was administered in Spanish. It underwent an initial testing phase with fifteen professionals from the Spanish insurance industry. Once their feedback was integrated, the questionnaire was administered to an additional twelve volunteers who were not affiliated with the financial or insurance sectors. Their input was carefully considered to further fine-tune the questionnaire to its final version.

While these make building use cases and workflows easy, solutions still must adhere to emerging AI regulation. Therefore, it’s important that these tools are rolled out hand-in-hand with training and upskilling on responsible AI practices. We don’t limit ourselves in use-case ideation, and we are doing our assessments as part of the solution design. However, it might shy away companies in Europe that build AI platforms or develop AI models. We observe that many large tech players in AI are located outside of Europe, for example in the US. Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Organizations need to be very careful when it comes to instances related to backup and storage. Authorized access needs to be provided only to personnel directly involved and ethical hackers can be consulted for improving the system. Chatbots are designed to assist clients and avoid problems occurring during regular business hours, such as waiting on hold for a long time or arranging for appointments for their busy schedules. With 24/7 accessibility, clients have immediate access to healthcare assistance when required. Administrative personnel need to manually search vast healthcare databases for vital information in the absence of chatbots.

When AI-based risk models are built, it can be harder to pin down what insurance companies are basing higher premiums on. For instance, if companies use neural nets — an AI technique that’s the basis for deep learning — the resulting model is opaque. Insurance companies would know what factors were used to train their AI model, but companies wouldn’t know how the model internally related those factors to risk and which inputs are more important.

In the travel industry, airlines and travel agencies are increasingly offering embedded travel insurance, providing coverage for trip cancellations, medical emergencies, and lost luggage. Similarly, in the retail sector, electronics retailers are offering embedded warranty and insurance products at the point of sale. It’s clear that the trajectory of insurtech has been remarkable, especially when considering the period from the pandemic to the present.

The study investigated the initial set of issues assumed to be factors affecting clients’ trust in chatbots for client service. The findings from the study show that the main issue of the clients not trusting chatbots is their poor security and privacy. An exploratory research design, which involves conducting semi-structured interviews, was used to answer the research questions. In Ref.43, a PreBot was developed that allows privacy within a conversation or chat between the user and the chatbot.

Schwartz, an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman in New York, used the OpenAI gen AI chatbot to find prior cases to support a case filed by Avianca employee Roberto Mata for injuries he sustained in 2019. In a document filed in May last year, Judge Castel noted the cases submitted by Schwartz included false names and docket numbers, along with bogus internal citations and quotes. Schwartz’s partner, Peter LoDuca, was Mata’s lawyer of record and signed the brief, putting himself in jeopardy as well.

Because insurance is about being in a long-term contractual relationship with customers, it’s important that customers know what they’re getting into. In Singapore, particularly, the changing demographics are a big challenge for insurers. We have the fastest, if not one of the [fastest], ageing populations in the world.

The questions about BI were developed based on those proposed in Venkatesh et al. (2003) and Davis (1989). Attitude toward chatbots was measured with the four questions of Bhattacherjee and Premkumar (2004), which were used in a chatbot setting by Eeuwen (2017). PU is basically an adaptation of items in Venkatesh et al. (2003), Venkatesh et al. (2012) and Hussain et al. (2019). Some of their indicators were applied by Palos-Sánchez et al. (2021) with regard to fintech and by Gansser and Reich (2021) to assess chatbot acceptance. The questions measuring PEOU we formulated were based on those proposed in Venkatesh et al. (2012).

Brainstorm AI attendees were interested in what sort of return they’d get from investing in expensive generative AI programs to improve their customer service. But now, newer AI programs are better at understanding what customers need, searching for the right information, and displaying it in a legible way. During a July 31 breakout session at Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore, sponsored by Accenture, speakers shared some examples of how new AI programs could revitalize customer service. Figures 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 give the second level of the ChatGPT data flow diagram decomposition of the iAssist chatbot’s five business operations (User Login, Claims, Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, and Human Resources). This means that developers have to share certain information with deployers, including harmful or inappropriate uses of the high-risk AI system, the types of data used to train the system, and risk mitigation measures taken. Developers must also publish information such as the types of high-risk AI systems they have released and how they manage risks of algorithmic discrimination.

CNA provides comprehensive insurance products and solutions for businesses across various industries, including life sciences and manufacturing. Its offerings encompass casualty, property, general liability, commercial auto, workers’ compensation and cybersecurity insurance, along with specialized packages for small and mid-sized businesses. The company has woven AI technology into its business model through offerings like the Bill Review project.

Nuance Communications, known for their voice recognition healthcare NLP software called Nina, also offers a customer service virtual assistant. The assistant can be accessed via voice or text, and Nuance claims it can be integrated into a company’s website, smartphone app, text messaging application, or smart TV. Personetics offers a chatbot for financial services aimed specifically at retail customers called Personetics Assist. The company claims the chatbot uses the customer’s most recent transaction data in order to provide up-to-date and accurate responses based on the customer’s financial situation. Car insurance companies now use AI in many areas, including claims processing, underwriting, fraud detection, customer service and telematics.

Technology

But when AI came into play, it let even non-musicians compose music with the help of generative AI tools. These tools can create background music, compose music, and even generate voices, and can be used in different ways, such as video soundtracks, voiceovers, or educational videos. Insilico Medicine leverages generative AI to revolutionize drug discovery and personalized treatment plans. By predicting the effects of drugs on specific genetic profiles, this tool enables the development of customized therapies, reducing trial and error in treatment selection and enhancing the efficacy of medical interventions.

(2) The use of big data analysis tools, which are based on deep learning and machine learning, to evaluate all the data available by insurance companies may allow more accurate learning to predict fraudulent claims (Rawat et al., 2021). Agarwal et al. (2022) indicated that these tools allow the identification of 30% more irregular claims than conventional analytic tools. Choose a chatbot service that can easily work with your current systems and tools. Check if it can link with your CRM, helpdesk software and other customer care tools you use. Having good integration capabilities is really important for providing a smooth and effective customer support experience. The growing prevalence of cyberattacks and data breaches has heightened the demand for robust cyber insurance products.

“This bias will permeate into the generated responses which could result in unintended consequences, furthering the reach and even amplifying the bias through the language model’s prompt response generation,” he added. Kitman Cheung, APAC technical sales leader with IBM, says RAG improves LLM performance by providing it with current and reliable information. By grounding answer generation with search results from domain-specific corpora – a collection of text, the RAG framework can significantly improve AI performance in domain-specific Q&A use cases. The insurance industry has always dealt in data, but it hasn’t always been able to put that data to optimal use. According to McKinsey, by 2030, the number of employees needed to conduct underwriting will be reduced by percent compared to 2018.

• These technologies provide real-time data on vehicle usage, driving behaviour, and environmental conditions, allowing insurers to offer more personalised and fairer premiums.
• Since then the team has rolled out other tools designed to help agents and it has about 4,000 users who pay for its software-as-a-service, says Colin Wong, CEO and co-founder (pictured, center).
• Shopify’s generative AI can be used for a variety of reasons, including product descriptions, personalizing customer experience, and optimizing marketing efforts through data analytics and trend predictions.

Users type in their negative thoughts, and the program suggests ways they can reframe those specific thoughts into something positive. More than 50,000 people have used the tool so far, and Althoff says users are more than seven times more likely to complete the program than a similar one that gives canned responses. New programs such as ChatGPT, however, are much better than previous AIs at interpreting the meaning of a human’s question and responding in a realistic manner. Trained on immense amounts of text from across the Internet, these large language model (LLM) chatbots can adopt different personas, ask a user questions and draw accurate conclusions from the information the user gives them. Massive Bio, a biotechnology company, has introduced the use of ChatGPT in the process of recruitment for clinical trials. The company aims to use AI to improve patient engagement by using natural language processing to provide relevant responses to patient queries through a better understanding of context.

Madgicx is a platform that automates and optimizes Facebook and Instagram marketing advertising campaigns. It employs AI to manage ad budgets, optimize ad performance, and create high-converting ad creatives. Madgicx’s generative AI analyzes ad data to predict the best strategies, automate budget adjustments, and ChatGPT App develop captivating ad copies, allowing marketing specialists to achieve higher ROI with minimal manual effort. Lee noted that Tay’s predecessor, Xiaoice, released by Microsoft in China in 2014, had successfully conducted conversations with more than 40 million people in the two years prior to Tay’s release.

Because the chatbot operates through Progressive’s Facebook page, the company can leverage social media responses to improve the conversational capabilities as it is used more and more. This helps the chatbot recognize new questions that are becoming more common which may prompt Progressive to update the information on the pertaining business areas. We compiled a list of 20 chatbot applications currently being used across multiple industries. We explain what the chatbot software vendors offer their client companies and how that translates to customer satisfaction. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This also includes internal chatbots made to help customer-facing employees work with their clientele.

They often have to navigate, with limited resources, a stormy market made of customers, competitors, and regulators, and the interactions between all these actors make finding answers to business questions a complex process. This would save time in the transaction by preventing a back and forth of further questions after the initial claim. Taiger also claims the software can assist in the customer acquisition process, but it is unclear how the virtual assistant actually communicates information to a customer as opposed to an employee.