PREFERENCES for insurance are continuously evolving and more customers are on the lookout for a personalised, efficient and seamless experience when planning for their future.
Meaningful data is key in the crafting of such plans, to enrich insights available to financial representatives who can translate it into customised recommendations for customers. In this vein, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to great effect – a McKinsey report states AI has the potential to create up to US$1.1 trillion in annual value for the global insurance industry.
Within this sphere, insurance giant Prudential is paving the way with AI.
Prudential Singapore chief information technology officer (CITO) Tomasz Kurczyk says customers’ preferences have become “increasingly digital-centric”.
“Machine learning, AI-enabled predictive modelling, as well as generative AI (GenAI) tools and solutions that are similar to ChatGPT, can meet customers’ needs for personalised insights and support financial representatives in engaging customers at an even deeper level,” he says.
These tools can analyse and provide specific customer insights to financial representatives, which would allow them to plan more holistically for their clients and offer a better experience.
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In time to come, AI could even have the potential to assess individuals’ habits and real-time activities to offer dynamic recommendations based on the latest medical research and insights, which would allow the client to take the necessary steps to pre-empt health risks, he adds.
Improving efficiency
Personalisation is not the only aspect of insurance that customers are looking for. The speed of responses and fast turnaround times are crucial to the customer experience, and AI can help with that, particularly in the underwriting and claims sphere.
“For example, specialised AI co-pilots can help underwriters to run through different scenarios and provide a summary of key information and scenario-based recommendations to speed up the decision-making for highly complex cases.” says Kurczyk.
This, in combination with domain-specific GenAI models, allows Prudential to automate the processing of policy documents and claims, which improves the accuracy of data captured. It can also itemise information from complex medical documents. This leads to quicker policy issuance and faster claims settlements for the customer.
“AI can even provide a summary of all information from across multiple documents and data sources in an accessible and layman format, in the language of choice, as well as provide insights that would have required a medical professional’s expertise,” he says.
AI-enhanced services
Prudential sees AI changing how insurance can be delivered, and has already implemented AI widely across services to offer a seamless experience to customers.
In the Singapore market, the insurer makes use of PRUChat, an AI-powered chatbot that can help customers get assistance whenever they need it. This frees up time for Prudential’s customer service representatives to focus on more complex queries, notes Kurczyk.
GenAI tools are also used in Prudential to synthesise customer feedback. Verbatim feedback, supplemented by contextual information from customers across multiple channels, is analysed through such a tool, providing the insurer with insights, trends and early detection of potential issues that enable them to make improvements across their services.
The insurer additionally has an AI talkbot named Grace that makes calls to remind customers whose insurance premiums are due, to ensure that there is no lapse in coverage.
Meanwhile, claims processing uses AI to help to score the probability of potential fraud for claims transactions. “Claims tagged as ‘high risk’ undergo manual review, while those with low fraud risk are processed automatically,” says Kurczyk.
“This not only saves time and effort but also speeds up the approvals while improving quality control and optimising checks for claims fraud.”
The AI-human partnership
Kurczyk notes that AI “works hand in hand” with human experts when detecting fraudulent claims, underwriting policies or determining insurance pricing as AI can act as an advisor to identify risks or blind spots, and consider various scenarios in the analysis, as well as prevent or plan adverse scenarios. Overall, these can help to improve pricing models to remain competitive and increase the accessibility of insurance to the larger population, he says.
“AI has the power to sift through massive datasets to identify irregular patterns and anomalies 24/7 in close to real-time, as well as anticipate outcomes based on historical data and run advanced scenario modelling,” he says. This includes spotting fake or altered claim images that exaggerate claim amounts amid a large volume of claims.
Prudential is leading the way in the use of Agentic AI in the insurance industry.
Agentic AI – that is, GenAI that possesses a degree of autonomy and can act and collaborate with different GenAI agents within defined guardrails to achieve specific goals – has great potential to boost Prudential’s financial representatives’ productivity. The piloted solution provides a concierge-like service for these representatives to coordinate and support, for example, complex communication via voice and text and scheduling tasks among service providers, customers and financial representatives of Prudential, he says.
Another set of GenAI copilots is used to boost employee productivity, as it is able to assist programmers in writing code, refine presentation content, summarise lengthy texts, brainstorm on ideas and draft update emails. “This has significantly reduced the time spent on manual work and lengthy follow up and admin work, allowing employees to concentrate on high-value and impactful tasks,” says Kurczyk.
New avenues to foster AI adoption
A vast wealth of information is required by AI to make effective recommendations and decisions. It is therefore important that the information is handled in a way that protects consumer interests and addresses ethical concerns.
Prudential is committed to the responsible application of AI in line with the company’s AI Ethics Principles, says Kurczyk. It also adheres to the principles of fairness, ethics, accountability, and transparency, or Feat, in the use of AI and data analytics in finance, and participates in the Veritas initiative, a collaborative project between the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the finance industry that promotes responsible AI adoption.
“AI adoption is part of our strategy and ambition to be a trusted partner and insurer-of-choice for our customers,” he says.
As AI adoption grows, the insurer is also looking to go beyond the current technical boundaries and push forward with its AI-driven initiatives.
“Today, AI technology is being adopted at an unprecedented scale not just in business but also in society,” says Kurczyk.
“All of us, including our customers, are experimenting and using it in one way or another at work or on a personal level, and it is imperative for insurers to embrace and adopt technology to stay ahead of customer trends in a fast-paced and technology-driven world.”
In this vein, the insurer is officially launching the Prudential AI Lab, based in Singapore. “This is our global hub for accelerating development of innovative AI solutions and organisation-wide adoption across geographies,” he says.
The Lab has established a number of partnerships, including one with Google Cloud which is the first partnership of its kind for the insurance industry in Asia and Africa.
The Lab will provide Prudential’s 15,000 employees with a global sandbox environment and step-by-step process for turning their ideas into scalable AI products and applications, which in turn presents an opportunity to shape the future of AI in life and health insurance. These solutions will focus on health, wealth, and digital-powered distribution and operations and accelerate Prudential’s adoption of advanced AI and GenAI.
For example, one health use case that the Prudential AI Lab team is working on is a claims adjudication solution which uses an AI model that compares the prescribed treatment in customers’ medical invoices with the appropriate prescribed treatment for their medical condition. A match between the two indicates that the treatment is appropriate and the claim can be approved. Several proof-of-concept tests showed that it boosted the accuracy of claims decisions and doubled the automation rate of claim reviews and assessments, enabling the insurer to handle a larger volume of claims more efficiently, adds Kurczyk.
“This solution will allow us to reduce the turnaround time for claims approvals with similar levels of accuracy when compared to manual processing,” he says.
The insurer is also “equally investing in providing AI training and education” to its employees, ensuring that they can take full advantage of the AI tools and are future-ready to support Prudential customers and financial representatives.
“Insurance is fundamentally a people business that emphasises understanding individual needs, providing tailored solutions and building trust,” says the CITO.
“At Prudential, we view technology as a key enabler in how we serve our customers and our financial representatives, allowing us to provide a more personalised, efficient and effective service and enhance the human connection that’s at the heart of the insurance industry.”
