Is ChatGPT Coming for Your Job?
Artificial intelligence tools will definitely transform the workplace. But that doesn’t mean rank-and-file workers will become obsolete.
By Cheryl Winokur Munk
With the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT taking the world by storm, many insurance industry workers may be wondering what advances in AI could mean for their job security.
While AI will increasingly replace routine, mundane tasks, the conventional wisdom is that it won’t lead to extensive job losses.
Rather, insurers will often try to retrain and retool existing workers to perform more complicated functions that benefit from human involvement, such as enhanced customer service and strategic planning. In other cases, insurers are adding new AI-centered roles that require people at the helm, including model training, data management, data science and new product design.
“This is really going to change the way people work, but it’s going to let them work on higher-level problems,” said Jonathan Tushman, chief product officer at Hi Marley, an intelligent communication platform for the insurance industry.
Shifting Tides
While most insurers today don’t have the deeper technology to be able to use AI tools extensively or get the most out of them, that should start to change in the next few years, said Harry Newberry, manager at the London-based consulting firm Elixirr, whose focus includes insurance.
There are already a number of use cases. Newberry offers the example of a dental insurer that’s using AI to validate X-rays and make the claims process more efficient. This allows the insurer to reposition clinical experts who had been helping with claims, assigning them to other areas of the business, such as customer engagement or product design, he said.
AI is also being used to sift through myriad disability claims, identify potential jobs and return more people to work, saving disability carriers money, said Tomas Vykruta, co-founder and chief executive of New York-based EvolutionIQ, which offers an AI-driven claims guidance platform for carriers. This process is labor intensive for people and the success rate is not as high as when AI is used, he said.
AI, for example, swiftly identified a telehealth position for a nurse who couldn’t handle the physical demands of an in-person role and had been on long-term disability for eight years. This saved the carrier tens of thousands of dollars in payments, and the nurse earned more than she did in her previous role, Vykruta said. “There’s so much inefficiency in the system that people are transitioning to long-term disabled because they are being overlooked.”
Complementary Approach
While many mundane, repetitive tasks can be done by AI, people are still needed to provide customer service and other high-level functions that computers aren’t well-equipped to handle, said Tracey Malcolm, global future of work and risk leader at the advisory firm WTW. “If the claim is complex and the content highly nuanced, that’s where AI is going to struggle,” she said.
Indeed, insurers are looking at how best to use their human capital in tandem with computer models. It makes better business sense to retrain good workers who are already familiar with the organization and culture than to let them go and hire outsiders, said Jason Juliano, director at Eisner Advisory Group, who focuses on digital transformation.
“It’s going to provide an opportunity for everyone to be more creative in looking at what they can do today compared to what they can do in the future,” he said.
Reliance Global Group Inc., for example, is using AI internally to replace many routine, customer-service functions, said Grant Barra, SVP of operations. Those people can now focus on other opportunities such as following up with previously insured individuals whose policies have lapsed, making outbound calls to policyholders for cross-sell purposes, and recruiting additional agency partners, he said. The company’s use of AI is not necessarily saving money on payroll, but it’s improving productivity, “thus making us more profitable,” Barra said.
Launched last year, Tractable’s AI property solution allows policyholders to take and submit photos of home-related damage through a mobile-friendly, web-based app, allowing Tractable to assess the damage and write the appraisal. This allows an insurer’s existing staff to spend more time interacting with customers, performing hands-on services such as helping them find an alternative temporary residence, said Jimmy Spears, head of automotive and property at Tractable.
On the auto side, Tractable’s AI systems assess damage and accelerate the claims and repair process. This leaves workers more time to focus on activities such as making sure the policyholder has a rental car or locating parts on backorder, which can help boost customer satisfaction levels and increase the likelihood of policy renewal, Spears said.
In commercial P&C insurance, underwriting teams are using Convr’s AI-drivenunderwriting platform to simplify and streamline their workflows to come up with quotes faster and improve experiences for their customers. Still, humans are required to complete the insurance application process, CEO John Stammen said in an email.
Using Convr, Crum & Forster Insurance in Morristown, N.J., was able to reduce submission processing time in one of its business lines by 50% while redeploying 40% of its contractor workforce to higher-value tasks and 20% of its operations team to revenue-generating roles, he said.
The Future is Just Beginning
To be sure, the evolving role of AI within insurance is a work in progress, and there are likely to be many changes on the horizon in the next several years.
Even if there are fewer workers for certain positions, industry watchers said insurers are likely to continue shifting personnel and adding new roles to support AI. These include training AI models, model management and review, data management, data scientists, and designing new products that incorporate AI, said David Radvany, partner at the global management and technology consultancy Capco, who focuses on technology and insurance.
“In order for insurance companies to create these new products, incorporating artificial intelligence, they certainly need humans, and the jobs those humans will fill are jobs that didn’t exist years ago,” he said.
