Life insurance is on the cusp of a new chapter of reinvention. So far, insurers have gradually advanced comprehensive digital transformation. But with the impact of AI, including generative AI, change is coming quickly. We are in an exciting new year and life insurers are beginning to accelerate and implement their reinvention strategies. This is the time to be brave.
These underwriting forecasts provide insights into how carriers can take steps to become truly digital this year.
Generative AI takes customer centricity to the next level
Generative, AI-powered customer centricity will further close the gap between operators and customers for more personalized product offerings and services. This trend will continue to reach new heights in the coming year as new technologies enable deeper connections between customers, advisors and carriers. Recent research from Accenture found that today’s Customers feel the need for protection in areas that go beyond what traditional insurance offers. For example, the next generation of insurance customers say they feel less protected when it comes to their mental health. To address these and other concerns, consulting with an advisor is critical. However, insurers have not yet been able to offer this kind of customer experience.
Generative AI extends the care and knowledge of hyper-personalized solutions to more people. Digital agents, diverse chat capabilities, “ask me anything” capabilities, and the development of enterprise-level generative AI solutions are rapidly closing existing gaps within the customer-advisor-carrier framework in the industry – and it’s still early days.
In last year’s predictions, I highlighted how new levels of AI and automation capabilities would improve real-time underwriting decisions and enable a faster digital shopping experience. We expect this trend to continue this year as more and more life insurers begin to implement their strategies.
It is worth watching the development of generative AI underwriting tools in 2023 that will improve the efficiency and accuracy of underwriting and risk management, streamline processes and generate valuable insights. This technology, often referred to as Underwriter Co-Pilot at Accenture, will play an even stronger role in 2024 as it continues to adapt to advances in LLMs.
I want to be clear that new technologies will not replace consultants. These technologies are necessary as insurers continue to face skills shortages across the insurance value chain. The solutions, which are more personal and tailored, serve to address a different type of skills shortage. With the pension crisis still looming in the insurance industry, human-machine collaboration will become even more important as we look for new ways to support employees in the core business functions of underwriting and claims.
To demonstrate a concrete and current industry implementation, Accenture helped a large A&H insurer automate its claims process through the use of advanced voice AI, AI-powered human assistance capabilities, a digital virtual assistant, and proactive, multi-day trips. The trips were two-way messages tied to an event that helped handle a customer’s request in the same channel for a smoother experience, while the AI-powered assistant provided real-time AI-based guidance to agents during customer conversations.
Digitalization will gain momentum to begin the journey of reinvention
While life insurers are promoting digital underwriting processes and efforts, many are still stuck in analog processes. Carriers have historically been paper-based companies with paper-based processes, and this continues to be the foundation of the business as today’s paper comes in the form of PDFs, Excels and Adobe. But in 2024, true digitalization and the transition to real-time data will be easier to achieve than ever before, if network operators have the imagination and leadership to get started Journey to reinvention.
The reinvention will be about making life insurance truly end-to-end digital and moving everything in your business to real-time data. From improving your claims core and processing system to improving the underwriter’s workflow, once information becomes data, there are so many opportunities to rewrite processes. And the benefits are there, including cost savings, adoption and more. While I don’t think this will be the year you complete a complete reinvention, it is the year you begin your journey and focus on parts of your business that you need to reinvent.
I would recommend taking inspiration from one of today’s industry leaders. Ping An has launched a pilot digital solution to improve agent scheduling, increase sales performance and improve its life insurance business. This pilot resulted in a 30% reduction in development time and a 25% service reuse rate.
Now is the time to move on from that from experiment to implementation
To begin a journey, action is required. Several life insurers will take important steps in their digital journey this year by going beyond proof of concept and implementing the transformative tools and sophisticated technologies currently available.
Entering the implementation phase will drive business transformation, impacting everything from the underwriting experience to the claims experience to the customer experience and beyond. As a growing area of technology in insurance, intelligent capture (the ability to capture data digitally) offers incredible benefits as a starting point for this phase.
As a final thought for this blog post, another notable development to keep an eye on is the emergence of comprehensive care for beneficiaries as a prominent value proposition for new product sales – a topic I will explore in more detail in my next blog. Stay tuned.
Let’s talk about implementing initiatives for your reinvention journey.
Also, check out Accenture’s new generative network hardworking AI.
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