Machine Learning Today and Tomorrow - Carrier Management

It is difficult to open an insurance industry newsletter these days without seeing some reference to machine learning or its cousin artificial intelligence and how they will revolutionize the industry. Yet according to Willis Towers Watson's recently released 2019/2020 P&C Insurance Advanced Analytics Survey results, fewer companies have adopted machine learning and artificial intelligence than had planned to do so just two years ago (see the accompanying graphic). In the context of insurance, we're not talking about self-driving cars (though these may have important implications for insurance) or chess-playing computers. We're talking about predicting the outcome of comparatively simple future events: Who will buy what product, which clients are more likely to have what kind of claim, which claim will become complex according to some definition. The better insurers can estimate the outcomes of these future events, the better they can plan for them and achieve more positive results.