Dive Brief:
- American International Group is leaning on generative AI to modernize underwriting, Chairman and CEO Peter Zaffino said Tuesday during the insurer’s Q3 2024 earnings call.
- “In our early pilots, we've seen data collection and accuracy rates within our underwriting processes improved from levels near 75% to upwards of 90%, while reducing processing time significantly,” Zaffino said.
- Earlier this year, the company made technology a pillar of an enterprisewide transformation initiative called AIG Next as it divested a majority share in life insurance and retirement subsidiary Corebridge Financial. AIG Next “will create a slimmer, less complex company with the appropriate infrastructure and capabilities for the size of business we will be post Corebridge deconsolidation,” Zaffino said in a February letter to shareholders.
Dive Insight:
Insurance and banking are data-rich industries that stand to gain the most from generative AI document summarization, action recommendation and natural language processing capabilities.
AIG’s leadership is eager to reap the rewards as it consolidates operations following its Corebridge divestiture.
“GenAI can produce meaningful gains from reducing manual inputs and driving process efficiencies, however, our GenAI ecosystem is doing much more than that,” Zaffino said. “It integrates proprietary data from multiple sources with data ingestion capabilities to give us better data quality in a fraction of the time.”
The company completed multiple transformation programs, Zaffino said during an August earnings call. AIG has poured approximately $300 million in data, digital workflow, AI and talent to fuel modernization over the last two years and spent more than $1 billion on foundational data technologies in the last half decade, according to Zaffino.
The company added CIO Roshan Navagamuwa to its leadership team in January. The former CVS CIO oversees AIG’s global technology and cybersecurity strategy and core infrastructure, including cloud and other modernization technologies.
To further focus its technology initiatives, the company plans to house data engineering and AI operations in a new Atlanta facility scheduled to open in 2026, according to an October announcement. AIG plans to bring underwriting, claims and operation together under one roof to incubate digital capabilities at the innovation hub.
“This location will allow us to innovate and evolve the end-to-end process, further develop our agentic GenAI ecosystem, drive role clarity and digitize and modernize our processes,” Zaffino said Tuesday.
Using LLMs to build AI agents capable of autonomous task completion is an emerging trend in the provider landscape.
Microsoft infused its Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM solution with 10 agentic tools this month and Gartner expects AI agents will execute 15% of daily work decisions by 2028. Salesforce and SAP have also introduced agentic AI capabilities.
The arrival comes as enterprises continue to grapple with AI safety and accuracy issues. While executives have grown more confident about managing the technology’s inherent risks, most still believe human oversight is imperative, according to a recent TeamViewer report.
AIG’s adoption plans, centered around humans, align with industry trends.
“Maintaining the underwriter at the center of decision-making will continue to be paramount,” Zaffino said. “Our AI initiatives are designed to do just that: deliver better outcomes and drive operating leverage, while keeping highly experienced underwriters at the core of the process.”
