Co-bots, not robots: the next big step for AI in insurance » Banking Technology

Many have proclaimed that 2017 will be "the year of artificial intelligence (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. Oisin Merrins, editor at FinTech Futures Series (Banking Technology's sister company), explores. While efforts at embedding human intelligence into machines has a long history, recent years have seen a rapid evolution of the technologies captured under AI, 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 modernise internal data management platforms.