The Perks and Obstacles of AI Adoption in Insurance

Imagine that you are a leader at an insurance company. You know that artificial intelligence (AI) will give you a competitive edge and have decided to invest. You hired two brilliant data scientists, Juana and Yash.

Juana develops an AI solution that scans digitized customer files, mines them for relevant information, and calculates accurate pay-outs. You project savings of over $1 million in the next 2 years, and 30% increased staff productivity. Yash builds a model that predicts fraud to speed up a manual review process that requires a 2-week review per claim, with about 30,000 claims per month. You project 210% ROI in the next year and $6 million saved in fraud prevention.

One of the best parts of this hypothetical is that the two example AI models mentioned above are real. Fukoku Insurance and Anadolu Sigorta built the models mentioned above – and saved millions.

AI can be used to automate and improve key insurance processes, such as claims processing, customer experience, and fraudulent claim prevention. In our digitized IoT world, there is an endless stream of consumer data at our fingertips that can inform underwriting and pricing models.

In this blog, we explore the untapped potential of AI in the insurance industry, examine the hurdles to AI adoption, and show how Modzy can help.

Obstacles to AI Adoption in Insurance

If these capabilities exist, what is preventing widespread adoption of AI in insurance? Obstacles abound. One of the biggest challenges is leaving legacy systems behind. As with many major industries exploring AI – finance, healthcare, manufacturing – the core IT systems in many insurance companies are woefully outdated, based on now-obsolete code like COBOL or RPG/400.

Cost and trust are the primary hesitations that businesses cite to upgrading legacy systems. It’s daunting to consider an infrastructure overhaul that requires a multi-million-dollar investment. This is especially true for companies that invested in internal AI builds, only to find themselves spending more time resolving piecemeal flaws than reaping the benefits of innovation.

Such attempts, combined with lack of education about AI advances and the widespread belief that the technology is unproven, contribute to resistance rooted in distrust. Modzy’s recent research report “The Race Towards AI Adoption” found that 82% of decision-makers in insurance believe that AI is disrupting the competitive landscape – compared to 93% in finance.

Furthermore, AI is perceived as opaque. In an industry where it’s critical to eliminate bias from coverage and pricing recommendations, hesitation over handing this power over to a black box model is understandable.

Another major obstacle that goes hand in hand with legacy systems is lack of access to AI/ML talent. Data science and machine learning expertise is scarce and expensive. It’s difficult to know where to start without expert guidance on building and scaling AI. And even with expert advice, it’s challenging to move AI from prototype to production. It can take nine months or more and may still fail; less than 50% of all AI investments make it out of the lab.

Modzy is a Gamechanger for Insurers

Modzy was built to resolve the most difficult challenges associated with AI adoption – updating legacy systems, lack of trust, and difficulties building AI capability internally. Modzy is a one stop shop solution for ModelOps, an approach that enables you to use and govern AI across your company.

With Modzy, you’re not required to overhaul your entire infrastructure. Modzy integrates with your existing tools and tech stack. You don’t have to forego the business applications you use for claims management, CRM, accounting, and business process automation. Whether you’re using Salesforce or Zendesk to manage leads, Tableau for analytics, or ArcGIS for location-based insight, Modzy supercharges your existing tools with AI.

To address the issue of trust, Modzy has developed a market-leading solution for AI explainability. Explainability enables you to lift the veil on black box AI to understand how AI models arrive at decisions. Explainability is critically important for insurers. Not only do insurance companies need AI to interpret troves of customer data, but must also be able to justify that pricing and underwriting recommendations are fair.

Bottom line? Modzy is a secure and centralized ModelOps solution that automates deployment so you can start using your AI at scale immediately. Modzy provides a central platform to manage and govern your models. Modzy protects your data, sets usage limits to control cost, monitors for data drift, and sends alerts when models are underperforming. Modzy an help insurers reap the benefits of AI at scale.

Insurance executives are seeing the power of AI technology and starting to invest. But the insurers that reap the rewards of AI will be those that see the investment through to full scale production with ModelOps.