At least two cool ways that AI can help insurance companies

Machine learning could be used to underwrite faster, reduce fraud and assess vehicle damages more accurately, Lawrence Wong, Munich Re Canada's director of application development, said Tuesday. Technology Conference in Toronto, Wong said that artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay and will augment the way people do the business of insurance, whether insurers leverage it or not. "The power of machine learning is that you don't have to explicitly program it," Wong said during the session Case Studies in AI. "As you show [a self-learning machine] more and more pictures of bumper damage, it will, with experience, become more accurate at defining what's vehicle damage versus what's quirky vehicle design from the car manufacturer. "Notice I said the word experience," Wong added. "That's exactly how a human loss adjuster would learn about vehicle damage.