The week began with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella telling the world that chat bots were taking shape in the insurance industry.
Artificial Intelligence conversationalists are widely used towards customer service needs but perhaps the most surprising is the automated insurance agent known as SPIXII (pronounced “spick-see”).
This robo-agent doesn’t use forms, it has a “guided conversation” to extract information from consumers, SPIXII’s co-founder and CEO Renaud Million said.
“Digital customers don’t engage because they are hopelessly lost in the complex jargon and they don’t want to fill out a form, it’s not fun,” Million said.
“You have a lot of old infrastructure and technology in the insurance industry, it’s really ripe for automation. The websites and customer facing digital facilities are just too dry. On the other side you have really good human to human conversation… the chat bot is exactly in the middle.”
Million insists he’s not taking jobs away from human agents and brokers, arguing there’s still a role for them to play.
“If you talk to brokers they’ll tell you they spend a lot of time answering the same questions over and over again - this is where we come in, they can focus on added value,” Million said.
SPIXII analyzes all of an insurance company’s procedures and regulatory requirements before mapping out every possible customer interaction.
The chat bot then initiates an online text conversation, questions the potential policyholder and suggests products for them to buy.
And because it’s a machine and not a human being, it’s capable of working in every sector of the insurance industry.
Transparency, Million argues, is one of the more noble benefits of simplifying the language around policies so the insured can know what they’re paying for.
In very recent history A.I. has proven unfit for real world application.
An example Million points out is Microsoft’s chat bot named Tay, who very publicly became a Nazi within 24 hours of operating its twitter account, with tweets such as ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’ and ‘Hitler was right, I hate the Jews’, all appearing because her responses were based on real conversations she had with humans online – and humans enjoy hijacking corporate PR.
This won’t happen to SPIXII, Million contends, because Microsoft was using a model of A.I. that learns by taking in information and regurgitating it out while SPIXII is more contained.
For now the company only operates in Europe and is based out of the UK, partnering with insurance companies and banks, but is eyeing markets elsewhere.
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