Insurance company finds its digital edge in AI

Epiphanies at innovation conventions are hardly new, but Tim Heinze wasn't expecting his when the light bulb went off. The director of strategic operations for insurance company AXA XL's North American property unit, Heinze had just watched a presentation in which an IBM engineer talked about how Watson, the company's artificial intelligence (AI) software, generates efficiencies in offshore oil drilling operations. The presenter claimed that the Watson technology could "help one engineer think like a thousand." "That caught my attention," Heinze recalls, nodding to the red-hot trend of using sophisticated software to augment work performed by humans. AXA XL is piloting AI and natural language processing (NLP) software to help populate and process information on commercial business properties.