Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionise business and can be used to personalise corporate trips, streamline operations, and save costs. Accenture is now encouraging insurers to commit to the technology following a study conducted by the consultancy firm.
Accenture’s Future Workforce Survey indicates that insurers who invest in AI at the same rate as top-performing businesses could receive an average revenue boost of 17% by 2022. According to SAP SE, nine in ten C-Level execs also agree that AI will fundamentally affect their long-term business growth.
Accenture’s report found that companies must also employ “applied intelligence,” a term that denotes the collaboration of humans and machines. The report insists that “AI, when synthesised with human ingenuity across the enterprise, will achieve exponentially more.”
A recent study from GlobalData echoes Accenture’s findings. The digital media firm recommends that businesses incorporate AI into their operations over the next five years, and failure to do so could result in a huge decline in market-share.
Ravi Malhotra from Accenture, asserted that “There are many applications of artificial intelligence that insurers can leverage.” He added “Many of these can make the insurer more efficient and also enable better experiences – for customers, employees and intermediary partners.”
Strategic investments could also lead to a positive impact for brokers. According to Malhotra, brokers could “benefit from faster underwriting decisions, greater transparency and new options for claims and other servicing processes.”
AI has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of brokers, but the technology is innately susceptible to bias. Malhotra contends that “AI needs to be carefully trained to avoid biases” and “solutions trained on data that is incomplete, misrepresentative or biased will make decisions that would be obviously incorrect to a human.”
There are also financial limitations, and some brokerages lack sizeable budgets. Malhotra argues that it is possible to implement AI on a smaller scale, however, and “customer relationship management (CRM) and other enterprise software providers are now embedding AI capabilities into their offerings.”
An accumulation of reports indicate that AI is integral to business growth, and Accenture’s conclusions serve as a solidification of a wide ranging set of studies. Although the capabilities of AI are almost unfathomable, there is no doubt that the technology will continue to innovate and improve operations in a broad set of industries.
