It's natural to link technology and artificial intelligence to industries like telecommunications, marketing, and manufacturing. Clients still receive cards in the mail, meet with agents in their offices, and speak with adjusters for claims. Yet technology is transforming the way insurance carriers provide coverage and how policyholders receive service. Technological advancements are starting to automate and predict standard insurance-related tasks, from filing a claim to adjusting a policy's coverage. As the industry embraces things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies, the relationship between providers and clients is also changing.

Kissterra's proprietary software is designed to help insurers target their marketing effort toward their key audience. The company has focused early on the US auto insurance market. "We felt like we can bring initially the most value in the auto insurance vertical," Kerzner said. Customers include auto insurance carriers, insurance providers and large agencies. While he declined to name names, Kerzner said that Kissterra has conducted business with three of the top five auto insurance carriers in the US, as well as some direct-to-consumer players.

The experts at Hauser Insurance know that increased digital technology adoption continues to bring industries (and businesses) into a more competitive market position. With this as a backdrop, the integration of application programming interface (or API) tools enables two separate applications to seamlessly interact with each other. This electronic communication link can set the stage for a limitless number of business and service enhancements. Within the insurance industry, game-changing API capability opens the door to many digitally-driven business growth strategies. Many businesses' migration to digitally focused operations has been spurred by a desire to deliver improved customer experiences. Many companies had begun to adopt this focus before the COVID-19 pandemic, including Hauser Insurance.

Digital transformation is sweeping the insurance landscape, and insurance leaders everywhere are being asked to pick up the torch of modernization efforts for their companies. Conversational AI is an essential part of an insurance company's digital arsenal as they play for modernization because it allows them to intelligently automate mission-critical components of their enterprise for increased customer satisfaction and employee engagement. But what is Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Conversational AI is the application of learned patterns in historical conversation data in order to provide a human-like dialogue for your customers whether via text or voice – sans human involvement. In essence, conversational AI uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to communicate with users in a natural way using human language instead of computerized speech patterns.

Just months after raising $28 million, Jerry announced today that it has raised $75 million in a Series C round that values the company at $450 million. Existing backer Goodwater Capital doubled down on its investment in Jerry, leading the "oversubscribed" round. Bow Capital, Kamerra, Highland Capital Partners and Park West Asset Management also participated in the financing, which brings Jerry's total raised to $132 million since its 2017 inception. Goodwater Capital also led the startup's Series B earlier this year. Jerry's new valuation is about "4x" that of the company at its Series B round, according to co-founder and CEO Art Agrawal.

"We're excited about it," Peter Colis, Ethos CEO and co-founder, said of the SoftBank investment. "It's more capital to fuel our mission of protecting families." Ethos plans to use the funds to build out its engineering and products team, as well as for research and development. Employees currently number about 200 people and are expected to jump to 350 to 400 by the end of the year, he said. SoftBank's investment is coming from its $30 billion Vision Fund 2. The pool typically focuses on companies that use artificial intelligence like Carro, the Singapore online car marketplace; DiDi, the Uber of China; and eToro, the Israeli online stock brokerage.

McKinsey has warned the life insurance industry does not realise the full impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the sector. Its expert associate partner Nick Milinkovich believes AI will change how businesses are run and serve customers. Milinkovich spoke at the ProtectX4 event organised by Protection Review this morning. He deplored that life insurers have not adopted AI to the same extent as other industries did. He said: "We live fundamentally in a more digital world than we did just 18 months ago. "It means that while we have been able to pivot mostly all of our internal and customer facing processes onto some part of a digital backbone, it provides the foundation on which we can embed artificial intelligence more deeply into how we run our businesses." Milinkovich also found that consumers are now expecting more from life insurance firms. They are also looking to engage differently with the industry. He added that financial services and the retail industry had undergone a "much more fundamental" customer experience transformation. Milinkovich observed that there is a stronger willingness from customers to share more information than before with their insurance carrier. As a result, the amount of data available has increased exponentially. Research by McKinsey found almost every insurance carrier worldwide feel they are not getting the full value of their analytics investments. But most of insurance carriers are looking to invest more next year in analytics. "What we as an industry have yet to figure out is how to scale these investments and see the returns," said Milinkovich. McKinsey considers that there are reasons why there are leaders who have been able to separate themselves from the pack. The first reason is that they focus on a basket of use cases. This means they do not focus on only one part of the enterprise but on its entirety. They also look at a portfolio of AI related investments. Secondly, leaders are deeply embedding AI into the way that they run the business. They also rigorously track impact, so that they can prove value and fund further investments. The third point is that management teams are focusing on business problems and bringing the right set of people together to do that. Milinkovich said that they are fundamentally AI literate. It means they understand the power of AI and know how to use it. He said: "They have brought together the resources in a cross functional way to solve these problems beyond just the traditional silos that we see in most institutions.

As the year 2020 proceeds to its conclusion, the status quo has been washed away. But some things have not changed. The goal of every claims organization has been and will remain quickly adjusting a claim at a low cost with high levels of customer satisfaction. These goals are often at odds with each other, which highlights the importance of strategic alignment. Insurance carriers have looked to deploy a balanced scorecard for their claims organization to measure results.

Artificial intelligence is likely to affect the entire landscape of insurance as we know it. Change is here, more is coming. Today, the insurance market is dominated by massive national brands and legacy product lines that haven't substantially evolved in decades. This kind of stagnation has historically suggested that it is an industry ripe to be disrupted. At Emerj, the AI Research and Advisory Company, we advise insurance leaders that want to leverage their extensive backlogs of customer and claims data to win market share and achieve data dominance.

After a hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IPO market has come roaring back. Just look at yesterday's offering for Lemonade (NYSE:LMND). The shares spiked by 139% to $69.41--putting the market cap at over $3 billion. Part of the success has been the overall bullishness in the equities markets. But there is something else that is important: Lemonade is a next-generation AI company.