AI is an integral part of that second benefit in particular, and it's helping the insurance giant tap data to solve core business problems. In this interview, Huntsman offers insight into Prudential's broad initiative to transform underwriting, including how it translates digital strategy into business outcomes enabled by data science. How has the data science team participated in Prudential's digital transformation journey? Huntsman: Because underwriting is such a big part of our business, it was the first place the company looked at digitizing processes. Historically, between the life insurance application, medical exams, and statements from the customer's doctor, the underwriting process could be lengthy and painful.

CIOs are tooling up an assembly line of technologies to get back to business in 2022, including a mix of solutions leaned on heavily to weather the pandemic and new offerings aimed at making the most of emerging opportunities as the pandemic subsides. At its virtual IT Symposium/Xpo this week, Gartner identified the top tech strategies it sees CIOs embracing next year, including the "distributed enterprise," advanced AI, hyperautomation, cloud-native platforms, decision intelligence, and advanced security, among others. Tying together these trends is the C-suite's ongoing recognition of IT as an engine for business transformation. "The two top business priorities for CEOs going into 2022 are scaling digitation and building ecommerce, with the aim of getting back to business," said David Groombridge, research vice president at Gartner, noting that CIO priorities will vary depending on whether they are tasked with driving consumer revenue or building products. But all CIOs will have common set of technology priorities, the analyst predicts.

A Bellevue-based insurance startup that uses artificial intelligence to sell personalized insurance options has been sold for $2.35 billion to industry giant Prudential Financial. Assurance IQ, an online insurance-tech company that started in 2016, meets its customers through an online portal instead of through a financial adviser. It sells life insurance, auto insurance, health insurance and Medicare options online from over 20 providers. The company says it has sold at least one insurance product to 300,000 customers and the site has had more than 18 million visitors." To the 144-year-old insurance titan, the 3-year-old startup's value lies in its online-first platform, efficient data collection and artificial intelligence to find personalized insurance at a much faster rate, executives said.