Artificial intelligence introduced in-house across many insurance classes is a “massive differentiator” and time saver, Marsh Pacific head of digital Johannes Veldsman says.

He told attendees at the Insurance News insurtech seminar last week that Marsh has made significant investments in developing bespoke AI capabilities across products and processes to improve operational efficiencies and help clients.

“Right now, I think AI is probably, for the first time, the top priority,” Mr Veldsman said. “We’ve doubled down.”

An in-house tool called LenAI has been developed to automate simple and repetitive tasks. 

“Summarising client information and reading policy documents through AI are ways of work we do currently. There’s heaps of work going on at this stage on that front.

“We can make mundane tasks a lot easier for our staff.”

For clients, Marsh has developed AI-powered tools for lines such as property and directors’ and officers’ insurance.  

Its property tool uses AI and risk engineering data to analyse and score thousands of addresses, using claims and information from underwriters. 

“We can take an asset schedule and ingest it. We’ve just done an exercise the other day for one of the big property groups where 40,000 properties were lined up ... within four minutes it was mapped out, all of that information overlaid. That’s been a massive differentiator. That would have taken a colleague about a week do something like that.”

Marsh’s D&O tool can predict the likelihood and severity of claims, which Mr Veldsman says has been a “game-changer” for discussions with clients. A supply chain risk assessment tool uses global data to identify threats for clients. 

"Getting all the information in a live environment and then utilising that with our digital tools that we’ve got has been fantastic. It’s been something that’s been very well received.”

Mr Veldsman says the goal at Marsh is for technology to create more time to spend with clients, and it is “not so much” about cutting costs.