Allstate Says Almost All Its Communications About Insurance Claims Are Done With AI Now
Insurance company Allstate has revealed that almost all of the communications its reps send out to claimants are now written by AI, the Wall Street Journal reports.
It’s a surprising revelation, highlighting the significant role generative AI will play — and is already playing — in our daily lives.
In other words, there’s a growing chance an AI will be denying your insurance claim in the near future, or that it already has.
Allstate chief information officer Zulfi Jeevanjee told the WSJ that AI-generated emails tend to be less accusatory and jargony.
“When these emails used to go out, even though we had standards and so on, they would include a lot of insurance jargon,” he said. “They weren’t very empathetic… Claims agents would get frustrated, and so it wasn’t necessarily great communication.”
Of course, the tech Allstate is making use of, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT large language models, is far from perfect.
“The claim agent still looks at them just to make sure they’re accurate, but they’re not writing them anymore,” Jeevanjee told the WSJ.
But it’s nonetheless a sign of the times, underlining a race to automate communications.
Allstate claims that it’s not expecting any layoffs as a result. However, executives have long warned that lower-level employees, particularly in the world of customer service and even “midlevel engineers,” may soon be out of a job due to the rise of AI.
Despite Jeevanjee’s reassurances that human staffers look over the output of an AI for accuracy, we’ve already seen the tech cause plenty of chaos. In the medical industry, for instance, “hallucinating” AI models have been shown to still make easily avoidable mistakes.
Health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, whose CEO was gunned down late last year, is also facing a class action lawsuit over its use of AI to often wrongfully deny claims.
In fact, UnitedHealthcare is only one of three insurance companies in the US facing class action lawsuits after algorithms denied potentially lifesaving care. Competitor Cigna was recently accused of denying more than 300,000 claims in just two months, spending a scant 1.2 seconds on average on each one.
Whether Allstate has learned those lessons and studied the many limitations of the tech remains to be seen. While simultaneously advocating for replacing human communication with the output of an AI model, Jeevanjee argues that the tech will allow reps to better understand the needs of customers.
“If I think about the insurance industry in general, we haven’t really done a great job of being customer obsessed,” he told the WSJ. “That’s really what I’m trying to drive.”
More on AI and insurance: Murdered Insurance CEO Had Deployed an AI to Automatically Deny Benefits for Sick People
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