Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…a mega seed round for ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup…the impact of AI on cognitive skills…and why the effects of AI automation may vary so much across sectors.
Insurance is not considered the most cutting edge industry. But AI has been making slow, steady in-roads in the sector for years. Many companies have begun using computer vision applications that automatically assess damage — whether that is to cars following a collision or to the roofs of houses following a major storm — to help claims adjusters work more efficiently. Companies are also using machine learning algorithms to help detect fraud and build risk models for underwriting. And, of course, like many other industries, insurance companies are using AI to boost productivity in many support functions, from chatbots that can answer customer queries to AI that can help design marketing materials to AI coding assistants to help internal tech teams.
Which insurance companies are doing it best? That’s what the London-based research and analytics firm Evident Insights set out to discover with a new index assessing major insurance firms’ AI prowess. Evident has become known in recent years for its detailed benchmarking of banks’ AI capabilities. But this is the first time the research firm has moved beyond banking to look at another sector.
Like its banking index, Evident’s assessment is based almost entirely on quantitative metrics derived mostly from public sources of information — management statements in financial disclosures, press releases, company websites, social media accounts, patent filings, LinkedIn profiles, and news articles. In all, Evident looked at 76 individual metrics, organized into four “pillars” that the research firm said it believes are critical to deploying AI successfully: talent (which counts for 45% of the overall ranking), innovation (30%), leadership (15%), and transparency of responsible AI activity (10%). It used these to rank the 30 largest North American and European insurers when judged by total premiums underwritten or total assets under management.
Two insurers, Axa and Allianz emerged as clear leaders in Evident’s assessment. They were the only two to rank in the top five across all four pillars and had a substantial lead over third-place insurer USAA.
Alexandra Mousavizadeh, the cofounder and co-CEO of Evident, tells me that the result is surprising, in part because both Axa and Allianz are based in Europe, where large companies have generally been seen as lagging their North American peers in AI adoption. (And in Evident’s banking index, all of the highest ranked firms are North American.) But Mousavizadeh says that she thinks Axa and Allianz have a common corporate cultural trait that may explain their AI dominance. “My theory on this is that it’s embedded in an engineering culture,” she says. “Axa and Allianz have been doing this for a very long time and if you look at their histories, there has been much more of an engineering leadership and engineering mindset.”
Mousavizadeh says that claims and underwriting automation are both big engineering challenges that require large teams of skilled developers and technology experts to make work at scale. “You have got to have more engineers,” she says. “For that last mile of getting a use case into production, you have to have AI product managers, and you have to have AI software engineering.”
Companies that invest most heavily in human AI expertise are most likely to excel at using AI to run their businesses more efficiently, opening up an ever-widening gap between these companies and those that are AI laggards. (Of course, in Evident’s methodology, it helps if management talks about what it’s doing with AI and publicizes its AI governance policies too. USAA actually ranks first on Evident’s talent pillar, but falls down to third place because it ranks near the bottom of the pack on both “leadership” — which is mostly about management’s statements about how the company is using AI — and “transparency of responsible AI policies.”)
