Anthemis Insurtech Forum: Insurance Applications of Computer Vision & AI of Today

In this installment of the Anthemis Weekly Insurtech Webinars, Matthew Jones and I dug into the complex and fascinating topic of how artificial intelligence (AI) is enhancing the insurance industry, automating processes and enabling superior risk management. To shed light on this from an operational perspective, we invited Ardalan Khosrowpour, CEO of OnSiteIQ, Raunaq Bose, CTO of Humanising Autonomy and Nischal Padmanabha, VP of Technology at Omni:us.

After a brief overview of how AI models are built, we heard from each guest about how the tech they are building will shape the future of risk management.

• Humanising Autonomy is training its machine learning to understand and predict pedestrian behavior globally, reducing risk for autonomous and driver-assisted vehicles and machines
• Omni:us is using machine learning to coordinate and automate complex insurance claims processes to better serve customers and reduce churn
• OnSiteIQ is adding intelligence to the construction industry, automating complex inspections and improving risk management by tracking and quantifying risk on construction sites.

All of our guests’ insights highlight the extent to which AI has the potential to enhance insurance processes, from operations to underwriting. For example, continuous access to job sites for owner/developers in the construction industry, including quantified risk management analytics, has the potential to enhance dramatically insurers’ underwriting capabilities (and save lives). Similarly, Humanising Autonomy addressed the use of nuanced street data to safeguard autonomous vehicles, and smart cities to keep all pedestrians safe. Omni:us described how its AI engine extracts and ingests diverse data sets — hand-written and typed — in order to automate claims decisions intelligently.

Considerations for insurers looking at the ongoing question of “build versus buy” were numerous: both the depth of AI talent and ongoing access to R&D domain expertise would be challenging for most insurers to develop in-house. AI teams, the guests agreed, are expensive to recruit but they pay off quickly in product enhancements, as long as they are energized by the projects they are working on.

Largely, the challenges ahead for the guests’ companies involve taking the great strides they have made using AI to automate even further entire underwriting, claims and risk management processes. To do this, they need to scale these technologies in collaboration with the insurance industry.

If you missed any of our previous webinars, check them out here. We’re back this week on Thursday, May 14 at 1:00 PM EST with Superior Data, Superior Product…be sure to sign up and join us!