Suncorp Group is progressively incorporating AI into its internally-focused risk systems, with early use cases targeting data capture around operational incidents and consumption of risk policies.
Executive manager of programs and systems Jonathon Rutter told an IBM-run session at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo that the insurer saw multiple areas for process improvement in its risk function, where AI could potentially assist.
It has since used proof-of-concepts (POCs) to test the efficacy of AI as a process improvement mechanism.
“One of the best ways to get buy-in for an AI solution is with proof-of-concepts, and we were really fortunate to be able to spin up proof-of-concepts for all of the initiatives that have gotten off the ground,” Rutter said.
Capturing quality data
One of the first risk-based processes targeted for improvement is incident lodgement.
“When a risk eventuates, we would classify that as an operational incident that needs to be recorded and then managed through to completion,” Rutter said.
Rutter said that the organisation typically wanted to record the cause of the incident, whether it had been resolved satisfactorily, and lessons learned to prevent a repeat.
AI has been incorporated into the process with a view to improving the quality of reporting and data capture.
“In this process, the quality of the data is just critical, and you can manage that incident much more effectively if you get good quality data from the start,” Rutter said.
“This [incident reporting] process is available to anybody in the company, so you can have a risk expert lodging an incident and the data comes through perfectly or you can have somebody who is on the frontline supporting our customers, and while it’s not frequent that they lodge incidents, they have the ability to do so.
“So, you need to make a system that supports the expert or the novice to complete the information that we require to lodge the incident, and that’s where we’ve incorporated AI into that process.
“If you haven’t provided enough [information], it’ll prompt you for what you’ve missed, and it’ll categorise it and help it flow through our process effectively.”
Policy navigation
A second use case for AI is to aid internal consumption of the “critical risk documents that support” Suncorp’s work.
“These are risk-based policies, not insurance policies,” Rutter said.
“They can be long [and] technically complex in [their] language, but everybody needs to be able to consume and apply them to their role, so we’re looking at how AI can simplify the language, reduce the duplication, and then on the end of that, how do we enable everybody to consume that data as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
“We’re using AI to simplify the documentation, and then using AI in a chatbot-style solution to actually respond to the queries that people would have previously gone to a document library, read a hundred-page document just to find that one paragraph.”
