Insurance in the era of generative AI: Use cases that transform the industry

For insurance companies that want to transform their businesses with technology, the past 12 months have been uniquely exciting—on par with the early days of the internet or the mobile phone revolution. Yet, what lies ahead is only more interesting. Innovative insurers are moving quickly to use the power of generative AI, and in this post, we’d like to share a few of the most important classes of use cases that our insurance customers are excited about today.

Back in June 2023, Sasha Sanyal, Microsoft Global Insurance Leader, blogged about the unprecedented excitement among insurance customers over the promise of generative AI. Customers were inspired by Microsoft’s vision for intelligent insurance and how the Microsoft Cloud and our global partner ecosystem were providing opportunities to build solutions that could not just deliver efficiencies but also create industry-changing competitive advantages.

Today, many visions are on their way to becoming powerful realities. The level of interest and creativity we’ve seen from insurance customers has been off the charts. Working alongside our partners, we have been more than busy brainstorming with business leaders and technology teams, hacking solution concepts, and collaborating with customers to build differentiating capabilities.

Use cases help to drive AI innovation in insurance

Central to our exploratory engagements with insurance companies is the challenge of finding effective use cases—real-world scenarios that identify specific business problems and define how capabilities or features can be implemented to deliver measurable results in solving them. A good use case can serve as a north star to help in the design, development, and measurement of a solution. And because a use case is tight and distinct, it can help a customer make fast, efficient, and insightful early investments in experimenting with generative AI. Out of our customer deep-dives, a set of distinctive use cases has emerged that we recognize as especially worthwhile for insurance companies as they take their first important steps on their AI journeys.

Context is important here. Above all, insurers are anxious to use generative AI to transform their businesses in virtually every aspect of operations, customer engagement, and product innovation. They see, for example, the potential of content generation to write automatic responses to customer inquiries, of summarization to assist in producing support conversion logs or financial reports, of semantic search to enable fast information discovery and knowledge mining, and code generation to convert natural language to structured query language (SQL) (or vice versa) for telemetry data. This list barely scratches the surface of what’s possible.

Insurance customers are choosing Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services because it provides enormous flexibility and control in creating solutions based on an organization’s unique needs. For companies that want to build their own generative AI solutions, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service brings together advanced models from OpenAI with the enterprise capabilities and advanced security of Microsoft Azure. AI is also being integrated into the Microsoft Cloud and in the Microsoft products that customers already use and love, including the upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot, which will create and edit documents, presentations, and emails.

Top generative AI use cases for insurance companies

In considering options to deploy generative AI, insurers and other risk-sensitive companies are starting with use cases that can help them learn without creating risk for customers and clients. Where generative AI is being used to generate content, humans need to be in the loop to review output and ensure compliance. Still, these early-horizon requirements leave plenty of room for innovation in early deployments.

 Three categories of use cases are gaining traction with customers today:

1. Helping deliver meaningful and engaging customer experiences

Generative AI can have a tremendous impact in transforming each phase of the insurance customer journey.

• In the discovering and exploring phase, company agents can receive automatically generated notes and recommendations following a customer call, or produce tailored, auto-generated emails to follow up on issues or opportunities.
• In the buying and using phase, agents can generate scripts to drive conversations based on customer profiles and conversation histories.
• In the asking phase, agents can automate follow-up activities or retrieve fast knowledge-based responses to customer queries, in simple terms.
• In the engaging phase, agents can be alerted to birthdays or other important customer moments and generate tailored emails and messages to nurture relationships.

2. Driving efficiencies in corporate functions

Generative AI will potentially change the way people work in insurance, impacting core function across the business.

• In contact centers, the ability of customer service representatives to respond faster and more effectively will be enhanced through capabilities that enable streamlined workflows such as automated follow-up on emails and the ability to search and retrieve knowledge-based information in contextualized natural language.
• In human resources, the ability to attract and retain high quality candidates will be enhanced with tools that more effectively screen resumes, engage candidates through the hiring process, and deliver the knowledge that new employees need to do their jobs from day one and beyond.
• In legal, the ability to help attorneys and support staff to work more efficiently will be enhanced with tools that generate legal and regulatory summaries and assist with compliance and other specific challenges.  
• In marketing, the ability to connect with key stakeholders and tell the brand story will be accelerated by AI-generated ideas for content across channels and personalized, targeted email campaigns to promote products or services to specific audiences.

3. Creating copilots for each phase of the insurance life cycle

For virtually every aspect of the insurance life cycle, there is an opportunity to enhance experience and add value through a copilot—an application that uses generative AI and large language models to assist with complex tasks and offer a suggested course of easily executable action. Insurers are exploring early generative AI use cases across the business. For example:

• Customer copilots can help customers find the information they need about policies and services across a variety of web and mobile interfaces.
• Underwriter copilots can help underwriters augment decision-making with automatic summaries of applications and policy documents.
• Claims examiner copilots can help claims managers evaluate filings, process settlements, extract data from documents, or facilitate data entry.
• Actuarial copilots can help actuaries expedite trend analysis and automate mundane tasks.

Get engaged now on your generative AI journey

Now is the time for insurers to evaluate and experiment with AI, as it is revolutionizing how insurers assess risk, process claims, interact with policyholders, and empower employees.

We invite you to learn more by contacting your Microsoft representative or solutions partner. Or, for those who plan to attend InsureTech Connect (ITC) from October 31 to November 2, 2023, in Las Vegas, Nevada, we invite you to meet with us in person at Mandalay Bay’s South Convention Center, Lagoon L, where we will showcase the use cases and capabilities that we and our partners are bringing to market. In addition, Microsoft leaders will be presenting at the event in main program and partner sessions on key topics in the industry, including the following:

• Data-Smart Life & Annuities: Embracing ChatGPT and AI for Insurance Transformation—Jeffery Williams, Director, Insurance Digital Strategy, Worldwide Financial Services, on Tuesday, October 31, 2023, from 2:20 to 3:20 PM PST in Mandalay Bay Ballroom J.
• Microsoft: Embracing Open Insurance: Unlocking Opportunities within Distribution— Sasha Sanyal, Worldwide Financial Services, Americas Regional Leader, on Wednesday, November 1, 2023, from 2:40 to 3:00 PM PST in Mandalay Bay Ballroom F; and “Women’s Leadership Forum,” Wednesday, November 1, 2023, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM PST in the Foundation Room.
• How AI Is Changing the Way We Operate in Insurance—Jim DeMarco, Insurance Practice Lead, on Thursday, November 2, 2023, from 12:30 to 1:30 PM PST in Mandalay Bay Ballroom G.
• Automating the Submissions Intake Process with AI to Drive Better Decisions and Better Outcomes (Presented by Indico Data)—Tom Wilde, CEP, Indico Data, and Naveen Dhar, Director, Insurance Digital Strategy, Worldwide Financial Services, on Thursday, November 2, 2023, from 2:40 to 3:00 PM PST, Reef A-F.

Next steps

You can learn more about how Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is helping our customers realize the future of insurance in the era of AI, unlocking business value, and deepening customer relationships.

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog