World Fund and Finance

This year’s InsureTech Connect conference brought together an incredible group of carriers and some of the industry’s most innovative insurtechs to connect over the technology that’s transforming the insurance landscape. ITC provided an opportunity to understand what’s happening in the insurance community right now, what carriers are excited about and what’s next for the industry. I wanted to share a few insights from ITC, including how carriers can take action on the ideas and offerings they learned about at the conference.

AI has reached viable maturity and is rapidly becoming an industry standard

Everywhere you turned at ITC, someone was demonstrating their AI expertise. From unstructured data digitization, to streamlined claims processing, fraud detection and more, insurtechs are quickly scaling and diversifying AI to solve all kinds of business problems. As we mentioned in our recent report, Why AI in Insurance Claims and Underwriting?, AI has reached maturity and

Insurers and their customers in Florida may feel some relief with the end of this year’s hurricane season. But restoration from the damage left by Ian and Nicole is just beginning. And so are the questions about how the insurance industry will respond.

In this month’s Insurance News Analysis, Abbey Compton and I are joined by Jane Tutoki, an expert in Claims and a Director on the Boards of Sedgwick and Fortitude Reinsurance. Jane shares her perspective on how insurers responded as the massive toll of Ian was being assessed and Nicole was bearing down.

While a storm of Ian’s magnitude would test the preparedness and resilience of any business impacted, insurers are having a particularly difficult time helping customers with restoration. Inflation and supply chain delays are complicating the already daunting task of assessing the costs of repairs in areas that are difficult for claims adjusters to visit.

Artificial intelligence has been around since the 1950s, but over the last several years the business potential of AI has expanded dramatically. We now live in a world where big data and powerful computational capabilities allow AI to flourish. Companies—including insurance carriers—are investing in establishing data lakes, optimizing for cloud-based operations and activating AI for targeted analytics.

Insurers are seeing tangible results from their current AI initiatives. Our AI maturity research shows that carriers’ share of cost savings generated through AI more than doubled between 2018 and 2021. We predict that share will triple by 2024. Furthermore, insurers have been fairly satisfied with the return on their AI investments. Fifty two percent of insurance companies said the return on their AI initiatives exceeded their expectations, while only 3% said the return didn’t meet expectations.

However, insurers are leaving value on the table. In our analysis of 77 insurance companies, we

This post is part of a series sponsored by IAT Insurance Group.

For the last two-and-a-half years the entire nation has been tracking California Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which changed the definition of who is considered an independent contractor (IC) across many industries.

Recently the injunction to keep AB 5 out of the trucking sector was lifted. This decision is impacting the approximately 70,000 ICs in California already faced with a myriad of challenges, including increased regulation, rising fuel costs and other supply chain demands.^[1]

Up until the 2019 California court decision that changed the definition of who is an IC across industries, the Borello test was used to determine the common law relationship between a business owner and an IC. With the new decision, workers are now presumed employees unless the business-to-business exemption is met, or the trucking company can prove all three “prongs” of the ABC