Suncorp is to expand generative AI use cases across its organisation next year under a new Microsoft deal.
The organisation previously had a three-year agreement with Microsoft for software, cloud and automation, and has renewed this for a further five years.
According to Suncorp CIO Adam Bennett, the deal renewal will enable Suncorp to accelerate its existing AI strategy and “move from experimentation phase to full-scale production across the enterprise”.
The insurer is actively exploring 120 genAI internal use cases, with 20 of these set for deployment by June 2025.
“Having established the right foundations through cloud migration, engineering excellence, digitisation and automation, we are now working together to safely deploy genAI as scale and transform our end-to-end operations,” Bennett said.
Suncorp has now migrated 90 percent of its workloads into the public cloud, an increase of 25 percent in the last two years alone.
Although the insurer has already developed some AI solutions, including the ‘engine’ SunGPT, it is looking to introduce more specific generative AI use cases over the next three years.
One it has already deployed is ‘Smart Knowledge’, an Azure OpenAI-built tool that quickly provides procedures, underwriting guidelines and articles for Suncorp’s contact centre teams interacting with customers.
Suncorp has also deployed an insurance claim tool on Azure OpenAI to break down ongoing customer claims for employees, including their status, progress and next steps.
Speaking during Microsoft AI Tour in Sydney, Suncorp head of AI Craig Parker gave an example of customers contacting their insurer during a disaster.
“When we have a natural hazard event, there are thousands of claims tens of thousands of claims,” he said. “And many of those are going to be quite complex,” Parker said.
“Customers might be out of their homes for six months, 12 months, or even longer.”
According to Parker, the tool brings together everything from customers’ communications with Suncorp and building documents into a “single view of claims”.
Parker added that around 1500 Suncorp claims employees now have access to the insurance claims tool.
“[Now] they don’t have to go to different systems and do that annoying work,” he said.
“They don’t have to go through that reading, [where] sometimes the preparations to talk to a customer [that] may take more than 30 minutes to go and get that information. Now they can have that at their fingertips.”
Suncorp said the claims tool has reduced the time to review customer claims by between five and 30 minutes, depending on the case’s complexity.
“It’s very exciting to see genAI start to have a real impact for our customers and our people,” Bennett added.