Advanced technology will help identify unhappy customers and turn around their interactions and claims experiences, an expert from Suncorp told a packed house at this year’s insurtechLIVE in Sydney yesterday.

Craig Price says artificial intelligence (AI) will bring improved efficiency to a competitive insurance market, lowering premiums by helping to set more accurate rates for particular risks. 

Suncorp is among the first Australian companies to access Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI service that makes use of large language models to optimise Microsoft apps.  

“There’s going to be less chance of getting bad experience with insurance if we get it [technology] right,” Mr Price, the insurer’s Head of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, said. “I mean AI actually looking at all the interactions to try to understand if somebody’s having a bad experience with us – or about to – and sending an alert to a staff member to intervene to resolve for good. 

“If you’re a good risk, you won’t be cross-subsidising other bad risks; you’ll get the right premiums at the right time. That’s where the promise of AI will actually add the benefits for the customer.” 

Insurers have come under fire for poor customer relations at the Federal Government’s ongoing flood inquiry, with accusations of policyholders being “coerced, gaslit, ghosted” and “very vindictive behaviour, lies being told”. 

Mr Price has previously flagged “huge potential in expanding [generative] AI solutions internally”. 

“As an insurer, we are investigating many use cases, including how we help our customer-facing teams deliver exceptional service, including during the claims process,” he said last year. 

“We see a great opportunity to improve how our people access relevant content, such as our insurance product disclosure statements, in a more intuitive way so they can support customers quickly when they need us most.” 

At an insurtechLIVE session called How Do We Take AI From Hype To Reality, insuranceNEWS.com.au and other attendees were told risks associated with the technology, such as built-in discrimination, cannot be solely monitored and managed by people, as that would be cost-prohibitive and “you will never get any value out of it”. As a result, AI will be used to monitor AI. 

“We have no shortage of more and more data and more and more attack vectors,” Sydney-based Microsoft CTO Financial Services Chris Modica said. “We cannot scale that in terms of individual humans, processes etc – you’re just increasingly going to see more Copilot integration natively.” 

The AI “co-pilot” concept is poised to take off, he says. For example, it can help meet the global challenge of increasing cyber threats. 

“It’s a really good example of how generative AI can help us with net new innovation. We are just at the early onset, but this [generative AI] technology only became generally available in November 2020, so to see that already emerging market – that’s unprecedented. We haven’t seen that type of rapid innovation ... that’s what really excites me about the opportunity in front of all of us.” 

Suncorp has 50 Copilot users and it is used in summarising meetings through Microsoft Teams and Outlook apps. 

“They’ve all been really happy,” Mr Price says. “The next stage is really to try to help our users open their mind around the much broader set of use cases and tasks they can use. 

“Some people need a little bit of prompting in terms of what they can use this powerful tool set for. So it is early days, but we’re really excited to see where it goes from here.” 

AI will allow chatbots to have “wider conversations and transact on your behalf”, and transform back office and claims procedures, Mr Price says. And it will enable Suncorp’s digital channels to let customers make more transactions “without having to get on the phone”. 

Call centre agents will be “freed up from transactional stuff” to be empathetic to people in distress – “a reassuring voice on the phone, telling them what are the next steps and reassuring them they’re going to be OK. That's fantastic and where we actually want our call centre people to focus. 

“These will take time, but the promise is there and we’re starting to see it. Claims resolution times will speed up.”