The landscape of commercial insurance underwriting is fraught with challenges, particularly in maintaining profitable growth through adept risk assessment. Underwriting teams must consistently review all policies and portfolios to ensure alignment with appetite guidelines, which is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. While the natural solution might be to hire more underwriters, the insurance sector faces a significant recruiting challenge and a shortage of qualified candidates. Moreover, the complex skill set required for proficient underwriting often takes years to develop.
Enter AI assistants, the next evolution in generative AI, which promises to transform the commercial underwriting process. These assistants are not designed to replace human underwriters but to augment their capabilities, making the entire underwriting process more efficient. Unlike traditional tools, AI assistants offer unique benefits that transcend standard AI underwriting capabilities. They can take on distinct personas, such as risk assessment or content classification specialists, and learn and adapt in real time, ensuring continuous optimal performance.
AI assistants can manage simpler underwriting processes, allowing human underwriters to concentrate on more complex tasks. For instance, underwriters typically manually review each application to determine if it falls within the insurer’s underwriting guidelines. Once trained, AI assistants can ingest guidelines and quickly assess applications, identifying those requiring human intervention. This reduces the time needed for initial screenings and increases overall efficiency.
When incorporating AI assistants, insurers must remember they are not a magic solution that can immediately solve all problems. Their effectiveness depends on the quality of training they receive from expert underwriters. This training process ensures AI assistants can manage various tasks accurately. Underwriter feedback is crucial for optimizing accurate results and successfully integrating AI assistants.
In training AI assistants, underwriters can start with straightforward processes, such as book-of-business reviews. Underwriters can allow the assistants to ingest underwriting guidelines and teach them to review accounts for appetite alignment. This allows for a comprehensive review of entire portfolios rather than spot-checking individual accounts. As AI assistants become more adept, they can be trained on more complex tasks that require nuanced judgment.
AI assistants can offer much-needed workflow support to underwriters, complementing rather than replacing their work. These assistants can quickly oversee routine tasks and apply the same logic underwriters use in risk assessment. By incorporating AI assistants into underwriting processes, insurers can grow their business faster while increasing the precision and productivity of their underwriting teams.
For more information on how insurers can use AI assistants in their underwriting workflows, read this Digital Insurance article by Sathish Kumar Manimuthu, CTO of NeuralMetrics.