With somewhere around 2,000 artificial intelligence (AI) startups out there, applications have been identified across every single sector you can think of. While few industries are as mundane as insurance, it starts to become interesting in the context of using AI in insurance. On one hand, the predictive powers of AI threaten to all but replace human actuaries resulting in reduced labor costs and more accurate predictions. On the other hand, autonomous cars threaten to decimate traditional auto insurance premiums. The insurance industry is roughly divided into Life, Health, and Property & Casualty (P&C).

In 2015, there were more than 6.3 million car accidents reported that involved property damage1 with insurance fraud accounting for 10 percent of property/casualty claims processed2. While not every accident resulted in an insurance claim, those that did required extensive effort to be verified manually. To help automate the process and to fight against fraud which contributes to rising insurance rates, Metromile, the leader in pay-per-mile car insurance in the U.S., staged the world's slowest car crashes to generate data and used a machine learning technology to help spot fraud more quickly. "With machine learning technology, our team will be able to better prevent insurance fraud and assist customers with hard-to-prove but common claim types, like hit-and-run collisions, car theft, and rear-ends," said Paul Anzel, a Data Scientist at Metromile. Each test vehicle was equipped with a Pulse device, a small GPS-enabled device that plugs into the OBD-II port, to record sensory data, to generate the digital First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and capture accident details.

With somewhere around 2,000 artificial intelligence (AI) startups out there, applications have been identified across every single sector you can think of. While few industries are as mundane as insurance, it starts to become interesting in the context of using AI in insurance. On one hand, the predictive powers of AI threaten to all but replace human actuaries resulting in reduced labor costs and more accurate predictions. On the other hand, autonomous cars threaten to decimate traditional auto insurance premiums. The insurance industry is roughly divided into Life, Health, and Property & Casualty (P&C).