Insurance firms around the world are grappling with how to best implement artificial intelligence (AI) in their business operations. Neil Morgan (pictured above), Insurance Australia Group’s (IAG’s) chief operating officer, told Insurance Business that his giant insurance firm is deploying 150 specially trained staff, called activators. Their role, he said, is to implement Generative AI (Gen AI) tools across the entire company.
IAG is the largest general insurance company in Australia and New Zealand. Earlier this month at an international conference, Morgan publicly elaborated on this Gen AI strategy to a wide audience of insurance professionals for the first time. According to event organisers more than 3,000 delegates attended Guidewire Connections 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
The COO of the big Aussie insurer gave a keynote speech about what he called his firm’s inclusive innovation strategy.
“We're referring to it as inclusive innovation and trying to create that concept across the company,” said Morgan to IB.
He said this concept is new. “We’re branding it internally so that we can have frameworks, tooling and people that are actually trained and organized to activate it,” said Morgan.
The trained personnel are called activators. “We're trying to find that happy medium of just enough structure, control and capability at the heart of the organisation because, really, the value is in making this available to a really wide group of individuals,” he said.
Morgan said IAG has about 150 activators trained and ready. He said these staff are there to help colleagues solve problems, take advantage of opportunities by applying AI systems to a range of tasks.
For example, relatively simple challenges like embedding AI into existing platforms to better service data.
“Right through to the other end of the spectrum, where deep specialists compose and build custom,-specific, generative AI type capabilities,” said Morgan.
He said IAG’s current focus is on tasks that fall in-between these two categories.
“This is about, how can we provide easy to use, low code-no code capabilities for people to optimise what they're responsible for in the company on behalf of our customers?” Morgan said.
For these tasks, he said, Gen AI will be used to remove friction from processes and perform tasks faster, more efficiently and with improved quality.
Morgan said the firm’s activators are trained to build custom bots utilising IAG’s core platforms and in-house structured Gen AI capabilities.
“They're the custodians and support network to make sure we do things consistently and do them at scale across the company,” he said.
For example, in the communications division, he said, if a comms leader has a great idea about how to use Gen AI, she or he could reach out to an activator within her division to get support to create it.
“We're trying to make that simple and non-technical but we recognise this still involves a lot of structure, awareness and understanding of the back-end models and consideration of ethics and risk,” said Morgan.
The COO said he was “pretty confident” that, once these new Gen AI tools are better understood across the firm, there will be more demand than can be serviced by the 150 activators.
“We've got these super powerful tools that can use natural language and find instant meaning from masses of data,” he said. “But this is not about coders and engineers, this is about putting these tools into everyone’s hands.”
Morgan said the back story to this new Gen AI initiative has two elements.
“Then this beautiful coincidental timing, which is the advent of Gen AI at the same time as us having just come out of our core transformation,” he said.
Morgan said IAG has had a strategic think about the implications of these changes for its employees and sees them as a potential launching pad for the firm.
“It's actually about what happens next and that will determine whether or not we succeed,” he said. “So that's about culture change, engagement of people and how we really drive the value from those simplification outcomes with all of the new technology, tools and capability that are available to us.”
Are you an insurance professional? How is your firm deploying Gen AI? Please tell us below.
