AI being applied in every part of the insurance world

Artificial intelligence technology is now being applied to almost every part of the insurance industry and plays an important role in streamlining underwriting and claim processes, and bringing customers a superb experience, ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance said on Saturday at the WAIC.

With the development of AI, technologies like data mining, natural language processing, and computer vision have been gradually applied in the insurance sector ranging from marketing to underwriting, claim settlement and customer service, which has greatly avoided human intervention and helped insurance companies reduce their operational costs and enhance their business efficiency, said Sun Gufei, head of the data intelligence center at ZhongAn Online.

Thanks to the application of AI, policyholders now can enjoy better user experience, especially in terms of insurance buying and making claims.

Take medical insurance for example. Users tend to be concerned about issues like exact coverage, underwriting, acceptance policies and renewals.

Unlike the previous way of asking customers numerous professional questions related to their physical conditions, ZhongAn can make a better judgement of the applicant’s health through simple man-machine dialogue supported by AI technology.

In terms of underwriting, people usually make plenty of consultations on whether they could buy an insurance plan with a pre-existing condition such as high blood pressure.

ZhongAn Online said with the help of AI it has established an insurance knowledge map and set up the industry's first insurance intention identification model based on processing more than a million questions.

The online carrier launched a robot called ZhongAn Answer last July, which has been consulted for nearly 9,500 hours and helped clients understand their products for around 2,700 hours since it started.