How Insurance Agents Can Use AI Tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a staple for insurance agents, offering various functionalities such as streamlining workflows, enhancing customer relations, and improving overall productivity. Adapting to this new technological flow might just help you in any way you or your business may be struggling.

From generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) to simple chatbots, AI is one of the fastest growing and most important technologies for insurance agents. But how exactly can AI help insurance agents like you with these types of optimizations?

Read on to discover how AI can operate in the insurance industry.

What Is AI?

AI is a technology that mimics human intelligence to solve problems, make decisions, and generate ideas. Most AI technology systems learn by processing large quantities of data and identifying patterns. Some of the main ways AI learn include:

Machine Learning – Uses algorithms to analyze training data to learn from patterns and correlations. These models improve with more data and experience.
Deep Learning – Networks that have complex artificial neural networks. These models spot complex patterns and provide insightful responses.
Natural Language Processing – Allows computer programs to understand and use human language. These models train with large quantities of natural language data, so they can communicate in a more human-like way.

Even if you don’t realize it, AI has integrated into just about every facet of everyday life now, such as customer service chatbots for stores and personal assistants on phones like Alexa, Siri or Gemini.

Without you, even if you just have to interact with it once, AI doesn’t work.

The most essential part to remember about AI is that it is merely a powerful tool created by humans for humans and mostly relies on user input to function. Without you, even if you just have to interact with it once, it doesn’t work.

How Can Insurance Agents Use AI Tools?

With many different tools at your disposal, how do you figure out which AI is most helpful for insurance businesses? Depending on the topic that you need assistance with, there are a couple of different avenues to explore:

Customer Relationship Management
- Platforms that automate tasks like lead scoring, personalized marketing campaigns, and interaction tracking, improving engagement and retention
Risk Assessment and Underwriting
- Analytics powered by AI help analyze risk, refine policy recommendations, and anticipate market changes
- Document management where AI can scan, summarize, and extract information from insurance forms and policies, streamlining quoting and renewals
  - Note: This may cause potential privacy issues or HIPAA concerns due to the transmission and storage of data. It is critical to consider this when using AI.
Customer Service
- Analyze client calls to detect sentiment, identify key action items, and uncover opportunities for upselling and training
Predictive Analytics
- Examine large datasets to identify patterns and trends, enabling you to anticipate future risks, optimize sales strategies, and improve client retention
Automation
- Automate tasks like initial client inquiries, freeing you up for more strategic work

Business needs directly affect what type of AI insurance agents may use. You can explore different kinds of AI that may streamline various aspects of your business.

Implications of Using AI in Your Insurance Business

Ultimately, whether you decide to implement any form of AI to assist you in your business is up to you. To help you explore and make your decision, let’s look at the pros and cons of using AI in your business.

Reasons Why Insurance Agents Could Use AI

Can automate mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing you up to focus on more complex work
Analyze vast amounts of de-identified data, including customer profiles and external data sources, to provide valuable insights into multiple different facets of your business
Provide 24/7 assistance to customers

Reasons Why Insurance Agents Should Approach AI with Caution

Entering customer profile data (personally identifiable information [PII] and private health information [PHI]) into an AI tool raises privacy and data protection concerns
AI-driven decision making can be complex and lack transparency and have bias, bringing ethics into question
Use of AI must comply with existing and evolving regulations

Innovate While Staying Safe

If you’re worried that the negatives outweigh the positives, don’t fret. There are ways to mitigate some of the negatives:

Be transparent and explain how AI is used in your business
Establish ethical guidelines for the AI to ensure fairness and accountability
Implement cybersecurity measures and data encryption to protect sensitive information
Invest in training and technology upgrades to successfully use and leverage AI

The most important thing to remember is that using AI does not replace final checks as a human. When using it, ensure you are not just copying and pasting everything that the AI is suggesting.

The most important thing to remember is that using AI does not replace final checks as a human.

Sometimes what AI does can be untrustworthy by leaving in certain errors or producing something that doesn’t necessarily make any sense. It’s essential that you pay attention to everything that the AI is helping you do — it’s still learning and doesn’t necessarily know when it’s wrong unless you let it know. For those of you concerned about whether AI will replace you as an insurance agent, this is the main reason why you have absolutely nothing to worry about!

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Overall, AI can be a helpful tool that optimizes, streamlines, and automates your insurance business. However, it’s entirely up to you to decide whether AI works for you. Take the time to do as much research as possible and weigh all your options.

Try out Integrity’s very own AI digital assistant Ask Integrity for a reliable taste of what you might experience when interacting with AI. You must first be registered with Ritter to use the innovative tool!