IAG says its platform now hosts 145 specifically designed automation bots, eliminating around 150,000 hours of manual work a year, and it expects to save 500,000 work hours annually with bots by fiscal 2026. 

A “bot” takes a repeatable process and executes it in a way that avoids tedious, manual tasks for IAG teams, for example automatically sharing field assessor outcomes across platforms. 

“The focus of our automation activities is to ensure our people are able to focus on highest value, customer-focused activities,” IAG Chief Operations Officer Neil Morgan tells insuranceNEWS.com.au.  

“We've got quite a few bots in our workforce and they all do very specific tasks along the customer journey to just make it that bit more seamless and efficient.” 

A recent example was automating the back-end platform work for assessors recording and capturing information in New Zealand, "ingesting that content and acting on it really quickly”. IAG was hit with 16,000 claims in a week after extreme weather in February in New Zealand, and used the technology to cope. 

"We were able to support the team there through creating little automation bots, as we refer to them,” Mr Morgan said. 

“It's not the first time but ... it was a really good example of a sort of federated model where it wasn't a deep technical team building these automations, it was actually our business teams, our customer facing teams, and their support groups that were using the technology capability and these efficiencies available to them.” 

IAG has been working since 2018 to reset its technology, has rebuilt its digital channels and is progressively deploying those to each of its brands and geographical areas. This “enterprise platform” has been deployed in SA, WA, and the NT, and over the next 12-18 months will be rolled out to two thirds of IAG customers across Australia and New Zealand.  

IAG has also used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help with motor claims, embedded to identify total loss motor claims at the point of lodgement and fast-track those claims to less than a week.  

“We can use AI to predict that at a very high confidence, over 90%, and off the back of that we can reduce end-to-end time for a customer .... from four weeks down to a couple of days,” Mr Morgan said. 

“We sort of think of the bots as part of our workforce, to deal with specific challenges that arose off the back of that specific event and really support our frontline staff in doing the most valuable work and supporting our customers. That's what becoming a digital company is all about.” 

More than 15 IAG claims and policy platforms and 26 pricing platforms are being whittled and “consolidated down to a handful of future technologies”. Over 99% of all new claims are on its enterprise platform, online claims lodgements reached up to 69% in some recent weather events and activity on the IAG mobile app is up around 15% in the past year. 

IAG plans to increase customers interacting with it on mobile to more than 50% of digital interactions by fiscal 2026.  

Developments in technology are a “bit of a match made in heaven” with the challenge insurers face of “being really elastic” to deal with major weather events and scale resources up and down, Mr Morgan says. 

“It has actually aligned pretty nicely with how technologies evolve – data science, automation, digital channels, scalable cloud infrastructure.”