We caught up with Niels Thone, the CEO of Sprout.ai, who were one of the finalists in the TechRound100, to get his insights into AI in the UK’s insurance industry.
Who are Sprout.ai?
We are an AI powered claims automation and fraud detection solution based in London but serving customers on a global scale. Our technology empowers insurers to settle claims in as little as 24 hours by providing data driven insights and leveraging the unstructured data underlying every claim.
The insurance sector is seeing significant rates of innovation – do you find that it is the case that the innovation comes first and the demand later to match it, or vice versa?
The movement goes both ways and there is an important dynamic. It’s pertinent that you listen to your customers and prospects. Our customers have one piece of the puzzle, they know their problems better than anyone. They have a general awareness of the solutions available but don’t know exactly which ones or to what extent those solutions can help or where the technology has grown to. Sprout.ai acts as the other piece of the puzzle, providing cutting edge technology and the knowledge that goes with it. Together with our customers, we work together to understand their current issues from several angles. Once we have a good overview, we can then inform them what technology can do, what our solution specifically does and how it can solve their issues.
Is there still a role for the human in the insurance sector – even in areas where great automation is possible?
YES! AI is great at doing specific tasks (often better than humans), however a human in the loop is still required – especially for complex claims. Some of these reasons include the wealth of soft skills and experience a claim handler will possess when dealing with a sensitive claim and the stakeholders. This continues onto customer experience – no one relates to humans better than humans! Our solution can play a major supporting role in helping claims handlers with the decisions they are faced with as to how a claim is dealt with.
Finally, even with our operational benchmark score of 97% confidence on our AI decisions, false positives and negatives still occur in the remaining 3%. A person is able to view our dashboard to see how the decision has been made with reference to the supporting data with the option to agree, disagree or adjust our recommendation. Due to this it is essential to have a human in the loop providing real-time feedback which will allow the solution to continuously learn! For us, real time user feedback is essential and therefore this is installed with all of our customers.
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