An insurer’s perspective on AI

How can I be a digital optimist, when I look at the rise of AI which has so many people so concerned? We don’t know all it can do. We don’t know if we can trust advice it gives us. We don’t know what it will lead to.

How can we trust AI?

By making sure people are at the center of it. By taking a pragmatic, positive and inclusive approach to it. And by giving you clarity about that approach.

Harnessing the benefits of AI in Insurance

At Allianz, we leverage AI to augment the full insurance value chain, including customer dialogue, underwriting, pricing, claims, and many other business areas. We already see huge benefits for our customers and employees, although we have only just started to unlock its full potential. With our human-centric approach to AI, we fundamentally believe that AI represents a huge opportunity for Allianz, our people, and society overall.

How Generative AI is a game changer

Generative AI (GenAI) has made a highly complex technology usable for everybody. It created chat bots that act as easy interfaces for everyone to help solving laborious tasks. This way, people get time back to focus on the things that humans do best: creativity, curiosity, critical thinking combined with collaboration and empathy.

In all forms, AI is a powerful technology that needs strong governance on data quality, transparency, and security to make sure it is trustworthy. Allianz records and reviews all AI use cases centrally and uses AI strictly along five Responsible AI principles: Transparency, Privacy, Human Agency & Control, Fairness & Non-Discrimination and Accountability.

Yes, it requires new skills. That’s why we are committed at Allianz to building a culture of IT adoption,  knowledge and tech curiosity. With the rapid pace of technological progress, IT learning and skilling needs to move fast too. This is an area that Allianz is heavily investing in: our people.

I encourage everyone to explore GenAI. At Allianz, all 160,000+ employees have access to our internal AllianzGPT which combines the latest Generative AI technology with internal Allianz data. It enables colleagues to quickly find simple answers to specific questions, translate documents or summarize extensive documents – to name just a few of its applications.

A technology of today, not tomorrow

GenAI is here for all of us to use. Allianz started using so called traditional AI elements like text recognition already many years ago. I remember using AI applications in our health insurance business back in 2002 to read medical prescriptions. This experience is clearly helping us today to be fast to capture benefits of GenAI, from handling smaller claims in minutes, augmenting our customer service with voice bots, to detecting accidents in real time, and improving the prediction of natural catastrophes.

Overall, there are more than 150 use cases of GenAI at Allianz in different stages of maturity, from ideation over pilot to production, and even in decommissioning. In parallel, we work on continuously improving the quality of our data and harmonizing it globally, to make it fit for better AI use.

AI is, and GenAI will, determine leadership in insurance. Allianz is committed to leveraging AI everywhere where it benefits our customers and employees, and can be used safely and ethically. We are on this journey together.