Co-bots, not robots – The next big step for AI in insurance?

Many have proclaimed that 2017 will be'the year of AI,' with a 300% increase in investment in its technologies predicted compared with 2016. Start-ups with AI at the core of their business in particular will be looking to benefit from this surge in investment capital, as they did last year when 550 raised $5 billion in funding. While efforts at embedding human intelligence into machines has a long history, recent years have seen a rapid evolution of the technologies captured under'artificial intelligence', spurred on by decreasing costs in computing power, advances in memory capacity and cloud computing, and the necessity borne of the generation of evermore quantities of structured and unstructured data. Naturally, the ability to quickly and automatically process this data and derive actionable insights is creating a lot of excitement across multiple industries, yet there remain a number of obstacles to AI adoption; many business leaders cite the lack of a defined business case or required skills, or the need to first modernize internal data management platforms. Advances in AI are also fundamentally challenging assumptions about what is automatable: repetitive, rules-based processes are no longer the sole focus as AI opens up the possibility of automating activities that require knowledge and experience.