Role of AI in The Indian Insurance Industry And Its Potential

Technology has led to many positive changes around us and insurance industry is not staying behind in making the most of the technology to improve their functioning and services to customers.

Traditionally, the insurance industry’s focus has been around the policy and product but there’s now a shift in the trend. The insurers are more and more leaning towards becoming a more customer-centric organisations and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been at the forefront of this mission. 

“Using AI in insurance has enhanced customer experience by understanding customer behaviour, streamlining the claim process, improving underwriting and preventing fraud. Embracing AI will help the insurance industry in effective customer engagement and in the long run a deeper penetration of the market,” said Shivakumar Shankar, India MD of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

AI has also been playing a major role in helping the insurers tackle its two biggest challenges — penetration and simplifying the customer servicing at various touchpoints. 

The insurance continuum starting with marketing to lead generation to quotes to underwriting and the various aspects of servicing a customer has many touchpoints and this where AI can simplify and address routine tasks thus taking the insurer’s reach deeper in the market. The industry is using AI to rationalize its operations and connect with the audience in an effective manner. 

Yet, we must understand that these are still early days for AI in insurance industry in India. Insurers have just started experimenting. Several insurance companies are using AI/Big Data only for their marketing or sales campaign or simple claims handling tasks. 

“In India, AI is yet to be explored in many aspects of insurance like customer service, pricing, risk assessment, fraud, and customer demand. To get the right insight from AI, we need a larger set of quality of data that can be used efficiently,” added Shankar. 

Some of the most common usage of AI in India is usage of chatboxes that helps in faster claim processes, providing policy informations, documentations and others.

“AI can also use ML algorithms and NLP to understand changes in customer behaviour during interactions for underwriting and claims and intelligently use appropriate questions/answers for queries helping reduction in gaps during interactions,” said Shankar.

AI in India has a lot of potential. Greater adoption of AI in the sector will help streamline the customer acquisition process as well as servicing process. Insurers will be forced to redefine age old processes while customers would find things much easier - like faster underwriting or claims settlement. 

The advent of technology and growing adaptation of digital usage will lead to a lot of online interactions and claims and AI seems to be the right answer for insurers to provided the best customer service.