Strengthening insurance operations with AI

Hi, I’m Will Dogan. I’m the SVP of Product and Service Line Management here at Patra.

What Patra means by “tech-enabled” services is that we’ve got technology that we’ve built and deployed within our operations to help us deliver the services that we provide to the industry more efficiently, more quickly, more cheaply. It’s a combination of Patra’s people and our global delivery teams together with the technology that we’ve built and deployed within our operations.

The reason why AI is so relevant to our industry is that the industry functions on the exchange of unstructured documents. So whether you’re getting a quote, buying a policy, going through the renewal process, filing a claim, dealing with commission payments — it all deals on parties sending documents to each other. So insureds sending documents to their brokers, who then copy and paste things into different documents that they send to carriers.

And all along the way, there are people keying, rekeying, copying and pasting data from one system to another to another form. Seasoned insurance professionals that have decades of experience are literally looking at two PDF documents and trying to spot differences just using their own eyes. It’s mind numbing. It’s causing people not to want to work in the industry.

The hope of what we’re doing is to give these people tools like people in a lot of other industries have had. Accountants have spreadsheets. Architects have design software. I think insurance professionals need an equivalent set of tools to help them get more done and spend less time on those mind numbing tasks and more time focusing on servicing their customers and growing their business.

I’d say Patra’s approach to AI is, starting from the beginning with a commitment to the idea that it takes AI and people to really get the quality and the consistency and the and the completeness that we require of the the transactions and the processes that we enable. There’s a lot of startups and InsurTechs out there that promise a bold vision of full automation of things, that in our mind, will never be fully automated. And so our view is that over time, our people will move from doing these tasks to supervising them. But even getting to the point where they’re just supervising is a long road. And so I think we’re bought into that. We have the global delivery capabilities to wrap around the technology that makes us pretty unique.

One of the big challenges with deploying AI is getting these machine learning models to learn. So that means feeding them a lot of data. In our context, that means feeding them a lot of documents. And the models learn from guidance from people; how to interpret these documents.

And given that we’re processing tens of millions of transactions a year, we have the opportunity to train in the normal course of our operations in a way that few other organizations can match. Today, Patra spends a lot of cycles ensuring the quality of the work that it does manually. As we infuse more AI into these processes, then that quality will just be embedded in the process and drive further efficiency. So in the long run it’s speed, quality, efficiency, and cost.

Another aspect of what makes AI hard for a lot of companies to implement is that there there are big models out there that are really, really powerful, but they’re also very expensive to use. Ultimately, this is a story about efficiency and cost reduction over time. And so using very, very expensive tools to save a little bit of labor, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

There’s a level of investment that makes sense for Patra to take on given that we work for hundreds of different customers. And that leaves us in a position where we can solve it once for hundreds of customers versus each customer having to solve it on their own. I think our ability to deploy technology and advanced AI technology efficiently and at scale, our ability to wrap people around that, and our market reach, gives us the ability to really drive transformation in an exciting way. This is an industry that’s well behind the technology adoption curve in a lot of ways, and I think AI gives us the chance to to finally get ahead of that curve a bit.

A lot of our customers and a lot of other companies out there are struggling with this question of how to approach AI, where to get started. Look to us, work with us, and we can help solve problems together.