In its 25th year, the annual Accenture Tech Vision report continues to be a guiding light for the future of technology. This year, the report highlights four key trends that are set to revolutionize technology: 1) The Binary Big Bang, 2) Your Face in the Future, 3) When LLMs Get Their Bodies, and 4) The New Learning Loop. Among these, “Your Face in the Future: Differentiating when every interface looks the same” stands out to me as a particularly compelling trend for the insurance industry.
The power of Agentic AI
So what is Agentic AI? Put simply, Agentic AI are ‘AI agents’ that exhibit human-like behavior, characteristics and interactions. Often, these AI have been imbued with distinct personalities shaped by their words, speech patterns, and tone. Agentic AI brings generative AI to the next level, with this ‘personification’ also extending to virtual avatars and physical robots. 56% of insurance executives in the report believe gen AI could have the greatest impact on reinventing their organization in the area of customer relationships, such as engaging with customers through Agentic AI.
What’s your AI personality?
As businesses increasingly integrate gen AI into customer interactions, a critical question emerges: What is your AI’s personality? 99% of insurance executives state that establishing or maintaining a consistent personality will be important or very important to their customer-facing AI agents over the next 3 years. Generic agents can lead to a bland and impersonal experience, diluting brand identity. 79% agree with this, saying that ‘chatbots that all sound the same are creating differentiation challenges for organizations like theirs’. However, agentic AI offers a solution. Think about it – historically, brand identity has never had an actual, real voice. Communicators have talked about the more intangible yet crucially important concept of ‘brand tone of voice’. Think Nike and you immediately think ‘motivating’ and ‘empowering’. Equally, Lemonade is known for its unique and quirky tone. Insurance companies and brands must protect their unique voice to avoid becoming generic. Now it is possible to marry AI’s scale and efficiency with the humanizing voice and tone of a company’s brand and values, breathing life and personality into digital representatives, hyper-personalizing customer interactions and unlocking customer relationships like never before.
In this blog, I’m going to examine the application of Agentic AI in three key areas :
- Customer Experience
In personal lines, Agentic AI can help amplify trust and loyalty that are critical in insurance service interactions, enabling more intuitive and empathetic agentic conversations in both policy sales and claims experience. Delivering service interactions that are highly curated, contextual and reflective of someone’s current situation can now be enabled by AI. 94% of insurance executives agree that the ‘context of the customer,’ such as purchase history, engagement behavior, and demographic/psychographic data, is important or very important in establishing a consistent personality for customer-facing AI agents. Additionally, customers’ ability to submit videos to back-up their claims should become table stakes, further cementing that trust. 74% of insurance executives agree or strongly agree that multimodal AI interactions, such as videos of medical injuries, crash sites, and drone footage of natural disaster zones, will be at the forefront of customer experience in the next 3-5 years. This will give customers optionality for how they can share relevant real-time information and how an AI agent helps them satisfy a claim or service request within hours (not days).
On top of all this, the best AI will go beyond and also leverage historical customer conversations to inform future ones. It will anticipate individual customers’ pain points and potential needs for future new products or offerings so the AI agent can curate value to customers. It should be designed to embody the unique personality of the company and brand values, including its voice (beyond tone), maintaining consistency and authenticity and creating more differentiated, dynamic and engaging customer experiences.
- Employee Experience
In both personal and commercial lines, AI agents can complement insurance employees across the entire marketing, sales and service life cycle and aid to accelerate decision making, call summarization and insights generation. This can help human agents focus on higher value tasks.
- Agent & Broker Experience
For any insurance segment, gen AI can significantly enhance the personalization of the agent and broker experience. This technology ensures that recommendations are more tailored to the specific risk appetite of each client, leading to more effective and satisfying interactions. Whether distribution is captive or independent, providing gen AI solutions to expedite decision making, drive dynamic price and deliver tailored recommendations to end-customers will enable agents and advisors to succeed and enhance the carrier to attract next-gen sellers and agencies.
Preserving trust and brand identity
76% of insurance executives agree their organizations will need to proactively build trust between Agentic AI and their customers. To build and preserve this trust, it is essential to keep your agents aligned with your brand by meticulously reviewing and continuously monitoring their training data inclusive of brand “voice” data. Work with AI experts to set clear rules and boundaries that limit their knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, demonstrate restraint in data collection by respecting user privacy, preparing for regulatory challenges, and providing transparent, customizable privacy settings. This approach ensures that your AI interactions are beneficial and respectful and that you are translating the brand promise and identity into a brand that users can rely on.
CARA: Irish Life’s leading-edge claims app
CARA, the Claims AI Reasoning Assistant by Irish Life, is a prime example of how Agentic AI can enhance customer interactions. It is a groundbreaking multimodal AI system that is revolutionizing the insurance claims process. Developed to address the critical need for swift and compassionate support during life’s most challenging moments, CARA leverages advanced generative AI and medical reasoning to validate and transcribe claim documents, evaluate medical criteria, and ensure accurate and efficient claims processing. By reducing the time from initial claim submission to payment from weeks to just half a day, CARA delivers an unparalleled claims experience. This innovative solution, which handles multilingual data and integrates with Azure Cognitive Services, has not only enhanced customer satisfaction but also significantly boosted employee productivity and morale as it intelligently assigns claims to assessors based on complexity and experience, ensuring swift resolution with the right expertise.
Agentic AI will make insurance a ‘Personified business’
The future of customer interactions in the insurance industry is bright with the potential of Agentic AI. By infusing personality into AI agents and maintaining a strong brand identity, companies can build deeper, more meaningful relationships with their customers. The key is to approach this technology with intention and a commitment to trust and transparency. The insurance companies that successfully introduce AI with personalities are not just personalizing interactions—they are inventing the ‘personified business’. What does this mean? It’s more than just a brand exercise. This is the first step to reinventing business models around AI. The more we build trust in AI, and the more customers grow an affinity for working with an AI, the more the door opens up to AI becoming a true direct channel for customers. Exciting times ahead!
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