Insurers Must Harness AI To Remain Competitive – Experts

Experts in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector have charged insurance operators to harness Artificial Intelligence(AI) to remain competitive in the national economy and the global market.

The experts, who stated this at the 2024 ORC Workshop organised by the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN), in Obanikoro, Lagos yesterday, noted that, insurance industry’s future hinges on its ability to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) if it wants to remain relevant in the near future.

Themed ‘AI and the future of the insurance industry,’ the guest speaker, Dr. Orlando Olumide Odejide, emphasised the transformative power of AI in the insurance industry.

He said: “Primarily, every industry is going to be transformed with artificial intelligence. As such, how can artificial intelligence help this insurance industry, which has to take specific things into consideration? The products that each of the organisations has created; how do they market and sell their policies? How do they determine the premium for their policies? How they do the risk calculation and some insured for each of those policies.

“So, the idea is that end-to-end, artificial intelligence can help, all the way from strategy and product development all the way to claims and reinsurance. The ways, the manner, and the approaches by which artificial intelligence can significantly help to transform the insurance industry.Transform their strategy. Transform them from a revenue generation perspective. Transform them from an enterprise perspective.”

Dr. Odejide, who is the managing partner at A4S& Training Heights, expressed that no organisation would want to be left behind for not adopting the technology.

On his part, the co-speaker, Jimi Fasina, believes the underwriters and the actuaries in insurance companies should begin to step up the game by learning new skills.

He said, “they need the skills for the sake of working successfully with AI vendors because further down the line, there will be issues of ethics with regards to regulators and some of the models that drive machine applications inside those insurance companies.”

He said, some vendors selling applications to the insurance companies right now might not be precise enough in the way they do their fairness judgments, noting that, “So, if we have to make development happen for the sake of making things cheap, for the sake of not misjudging policyholders, that has to happen. Also, they should be spearheading regulations even before the regulators come to them.”

Fasina, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tsaron Technologies, Limited, listed tools insurance players need to be familiar with. “Insurance professionals need tools like Python, like Halo, a programming language, and data visualisation tools like Power BI, and some of these tools are not that deep the way we software engineers or machine learning engineers would use them, which is why, if they have this basic understanding, it helps them to improve their skill set so to be able to relate with AI vendors and would also help them drive the ethics design with regards to AI implementation in their companies.”

He urged insurance players to keep in mind the consequences of applying AI to their mode of operations.

On her part, the president, Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN)), Yetunde Ilori, expressed her appreciation for the turnout of the workshop and the rationale behind it.

She stated that the workshop, and particularly the theme, is apt because this is an avenue where “we have representatives from all companies that are writing insurance, broken outfits, and also the lost adjuster, bringing them together under one umbrella and discussing the subject for the moment.”

To her, “the subject for the moment is AI for the future, “but we know the future is here. And unless people are well informed, they won’t take decisive action. So it is time for every part of the industry to begin to think of how to serve the customers better and facilitate our process, which is the opportunity that the workshop has provided everybody.”