4 Steps to Utilize Cognitive Computing in Insurance

4 Steps to Utilize Cognitive Computing in Insurance

Ulrika Mann

Ulrika Mann,

Cognitive computing is emerging from the shadows and rapidly impacting our professional and personal lives. Some insurance companies are already exploring the utility of chatbots and smart advisors to provide the right suggestions to their customers. Learn how to get started. 

Banking, financial services and insurance companies deal with an enormous amount of transactional data, contend with a large amount of back-office processing requirements, and need to scale up efficiency in advising their customers. Cognitive computing technologies might be the savior; it can comprehend enormous amounts of data, apply reason, extract insights and continuously learn while interacting with people and fellow machines.

A four-step approach
We recommend a four-step heuristic approach that will help enterprises not only see immediate ROI, but also prepare the business to transform for a completely disrupted future landscape:

  1. Categorize the technology landscape across a maturity continuum.Enterprises should look at the broad swath of technologies and categorize technologies across a maturity continuum. The closest for adoption are those that are highly mature, while those that are in experimental stages are at the far end of the spectrum.
  2. Identify immediate opportunities for adoption.Take a look at immediate opportunities that can showcase ROI and help free up resources and funding for longer-term projects such as robotic process automation and infrastructure automation. Apply mature technologies to these opportunities so that the success rate is high and realization of value is fast.
  3. Pilot and prototype emerging areas.Using a combination of mature and evolving technologies, identify use cases to deploy as pilots for business transformation. Prime among these are the development and deployment of virtual assistants – using deep learning for creating learning systems that can scale. The focus here is to ensure that as the enterprise transforms, the medium-term disruptions are managed effectively.
  4. Assess moonshot projects.Think radically and identify disruptive technologies; the truly disruptive ones are those that are on a three-year trajectory and should involve research exploration, and adoption of technologies that are just emerging from academic research. While mature technologies can provide a strong foundation to these moonshot projects, what will make these successful is the application by design of embryonic technologies that have not yet fully bloomed.

In what areas of insurance might cognitive computing be applied? Automated systems that monitor, track and report suspicious activities to detect, predict and avoid fraud can be improved with the application of machine learning. At a consumer level, robo-advisors can help customers make decisions based on their behavioral patterns to personalize banking offerings. In the back office, cognitive technologies are automating document processing, contract management and other processes where a large amount of human manual effort is being accelerated with robotic process automation supervised by humans.

In a near future, humans and machines will coexist to enable businesses to make faster and more informed decisions, improve operational performance and enhance organizational productivity. To learn more, download the report Cognitive Computing: The Next Stage in Human/Machine Coevolution