Through the Martini Looking Glass: Overheard at Our ITC Cocktail Party

As part of EvolutionIQ’s presence at this year’s InsureTech Connect 2022 in Las Vegas, we had the pleasure of hosting a number of industry veterans at a cocktail party at the Mandalay Bay whose attendees included executives from Amazon, Brewer Lane, Asymmetric, CNA, Dearborn, Guardian Life, KPMG, Marsh Inc., New York Life Ventures, Principal, Munich Re, Sedgwick and more.

While the cocktail chatter certainly included Vegas-inspired laughter, the revolving group also dove into more serious subjects about the intersection of insurance and advanced tech that will be occurring over the next decade. Some of the conversation snippets we overhead at the party included:

• The insurance industry is rapidly evolving and carriers are strategically looking to leverage technology to gain efficiencies for their organizations.
• The strain of COVID has forced insurance organizations to reevaluate the role of the examiner/adjuster and how they can provide enough support to ease overworking that important resource.
• It seemed everyone was talking about claims this year. A few years ago it was about sales and underwriting, but now claims is the new front office.”
• I was amazed at the level of participation by international insurtechs. Israel brought a contingent of 100 people from 40 companies from their insurtech startup ecosystem. There was also a large group of insurtechs from India and Europe.
• OCR/NLP [OCR is scanning documents into IT systems; NLP is natural language processing that understands the relevant text]  is now core to pretty much any data gathering or data transfer solutions. Four years ago, there may have been a handful of companies that actually said it was a core competency.
• The biggest issue for most claims organizations is their inability to hire senior adjusting staff and/or to train entry level adjusters. Technology that can help to upskill adjusters by providing them with roundtable guidance is going to be in high demand for carriers.
• At the show, there were examples of AI being added to everything. But it is only transformational when it truly automates a costly, time-consuming human process and actively changes it in a way that also changes both the speed and the outcomes. Technology is now bringing that change to claims involving injuries.
• Increasingly, carriers are now distinguishing between AI as a feature, which is becoming more commoditized, and AI as a transformation agent, which is actually delivering measurable, high-impact benefits across an organization.

Read more about EvolutionIQ at ITC 2022 in our other articles

• ITC 2022 Panel Discussion: Directly Impact the Bottom Line With AI-Powered Claims Guidance
• Controlling the Cost of Risk With Claims Guidance: ITC 2022 Presentation Recap
• Key Takeaways from ITC 2022 Las Vegas

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