Insurers should consider self-regulating machine learning practices before regulations are imposed on them, a speaker suggested last week at the Connected Insurance Canada conference in Toronto. Moderator Stephen Applebaum, principal at Insurance Solutions Group, asked panelists if regulators understand machine learning and their perspectives on using machine learning in insurance, particularly since it's difficult to explain the concept. Koosha Golmohammadi, director of advanced analytics at Manulife, acknowledged that there are issues about the explanation of machine learning models. Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, allows systems to automatically learn and improve without being explicitly programmed. "This is new in Canada," Golmohammadi said.