Urgency of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Today you can’t turn anywhere without hearing about the latest artificial intelligence (AI) engines. Whether it’s Bard AI, ChatGPT or other emerging tools, AI has become ever present. Schools, businesses, and governments are consumed with staying abreast–both defensively and offensively. For commercial insurance organizations the challenge is no different. Artificial intelligence will likely find its place as an important participant in key issues.

1. Material Change Visibility: With these challenging economic times your insureds may knowingly or not be exposing you to additional exposures. You’re probably aware that your insureds are carefully managing their expenses and even cutting costs. They may be actively shopping their insurance. They may also be creating or overlooking new exposures. 

Our customers gain access to the holy grail of insurance management: access to material change updates. We provide commercial insurers with the ability to surface changes in business exposures, including locations, violations, vehicles, employees, new risks and more. And we do this on whatever schedule works best for your business–monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. 

2. IT Platform Delays Block Process Improvements: In an industry where shaving factions from expense ratios can deliver immediate and lasting competitive advantage business teams have lost patience waiting for their IT teams to slot in their critical process and decision-making advancements. 

Underwriting teams have felt strangled by their last-place status in technology infrastructure updates. For many years, they’ve cried out for submission digitization, improved and applied data resources, and AI-infused risk selection tools to remain competitive. In many cases, those pleas have been strangled by large platform upgrades and/or legacy system concerns. Since 2016 Convr has been helping commercial insurance organizations digitize, structure and inform submissions with the most reliable industry data and decisioning tools–built to be consumed via UI or API. We support no-barrier access, taking pressure off already burdened IT teams. 

3. Expense Controls: If your senior leadership is asking you to implement new expense controls you’re not alone. Many producers, MGU’s and carriers are driving new expense management initiatives down to the individual business unit level as economic uncertainty remains front page news.  

With that reality, expense cuts and/or budget givebacks are hitting production and underwriting teams too. Hiring freezes, staff and outsourcing cuts seem impossible to implement on these already over-worked teams so how can these directives be initiated? 

Instead of looking at people cuts many teams are focused on operational improvements that would result in expense reduction. For instance, teams are working to reduce man hours on submission intake and data gathering. Others are looking at reducing loss ratios with new data sets and models. These are the type of business improvements that Convr customers have documented–not once but regularly. 

4. Talent Emergency: According to Convr’s Insurance Talent and Technology Survey, the top three causes slowing down commercial property and casualty (P&C) underwriting are understaffing, manual data entry and lack of good technology. In fact, 64% of P&C insurance managers and above indicate that their underwriting team is probably or definitely understaffed. And nearly half of them believe the underwriting team is probably more understaffed than other teams in their company. That’s a talent emergency!  

Even more, 48% of P&C underwriting managers and above say understaffing is negatively affecting their expense ratio and 44% believe at least with some frequency understaffing causes inaccurately informed quotes and 61% believe it negatively affects customer experience. 

If you ask underwriters, one of the best ways to ease the talent emergency is with better tools and technology. Convr’s modularized AI commercial insurance underwriting data analysis platform helps by digitizing and fusing submissions with best sources of information to surface insights, business classification and risk scores. 

5. Competitive Advantage: The continuous learning of AI means for every day you’re without it, your competitors who have it are gaining continuous advantage over you–from expense management to risk selection and pricing. 

Artificial intelligence is changing the insurance business–and every other business too. You simply cannot afford to be left behind. 

As a tool for problem-solving, the ultimate goal of AI is to make predictions or classifications based on input data getting smarter over time with continuous usage. Whether it’s your data or that of a third-party data provider or both, consuming data is essential to AI and the value it unlocks. For the sake of your data and your decision-making, you need Convr and you need it now. 

In business, urgency is a familiar foe. Regardless of your industry, business leaders are regularly confronted by time-sensitive challenges. The AI revolution is the latest in this never-ending continuum of business change.

Explore the new convr.com/platform page to see how Convr’s Underwriting Command Center can transform your underwriting and your business operations as a whole.