Applying for life insurance is a long and often frustrating process. Thousands of questions on seemingly every medical condition ever suffered – except yours. "We've had multiple occurrences where people answer no to all the [medical] questions, then they come to the'other' box at the end and they'll go – 'oh yeah I've had X'. And that question is actually back there, but they didn't understand it so they defaulted to'other' and started writing chapter and verse about their medical condition," explains ANZ OnePath's chief underwriter Peter Tilocca. Whenever answers are given free form, typically the application will require the scrutiny of an underwriter.

As a sector, insurance has not been good at the kind of deep data analytics we now see from machine learning. This is especially apparent in group insurance, which has traditionally lagged the investment provided to retail or individual insurance. Give or take a few key terms, we are still, in effect, asking clients all the same questions we were more than two decades ago. With the arrival in recent years of new technology, an odd contradiction has developed in insurance. Leaders in the industry know they must move to embrace artificial intelligence but they have been hesitant to commit to – and invest in – such systems.