‘AI can help insurance industry with risk management, improving consumer experience’

livemint.com:

insurance sector found its feet in India, the players were following LIC because that was the only example in the country. And LIC did all the processes manually. Hence, in India the insurance sector started to invest in technologies quickly.

Companies started investing in core systems, core applications, then came Web applications, portals, mobile applications, etc. But now we have private insurance players dabbing into the latest technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. Rajesh Krishnan, Chief Operations Officer, Bajaj Allianz Life in an interview to Mint’s Rakshita Madan spoke about how the industry can evolve with technologies like AI and how they can adopt it for better consumer experience.

Here are edited excerpts from that interview: As late as in the last decade or so, you can say that AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) started picking up because people started talking about them. I would say anybody and everybody talked about AI and ML, but we'll have to see in the context of what it does. A life insurance company such as us, I'm not talking about general insurance, primarily in the initial stages of use cases for artificial intelligence, we started investing in this because of risk management.

You manage the risk well, then you make profits. We were able to utilize the artificial intelligence in a more effective manner in understanding the risks of the customer, which means we were able to weed out the wrong customer and were able to ease out onboarding of the right customer. So with these models being built, we were able to predict a customer.