What goes round, comes around
I recently attended the Chartered Insurance Institute’s Shaping the Future of Insurance conference on INNOVATION + IMPACT. The principal subject discussed was Artificial Intelligence and the effect it will have on insurance. To quote its introduction, “AI is transforming insurance, from underwriting and claims to broking. This conference will explore what these changes mean for your role, your career, and the wider profession.”
Having been retired now for 25 years, I wasn’t quite sure why I attended the conference at all. I haven’t kept up with technological improvements and AI will have little effect on me for whatever time I have left on this earth. But I was intrigued to hear more, and I am a great supporter of my beloved Institute – THE CII.
I learned that the experts cannot agree on where AI will take us. Each improvement takes a fraction of the time previous improvements took, and each raises the level of intelligence. The need for human involvement is reducing. Will super intelligent bots be talking to other super intelligent bots?
My mind wandered to the early days of my insurance career. I struggled at secondary school and left with only 5 ‘O’ Levels after an extra year at school. University was out of the question. So, in 1959 I joined Reliance Fire and Accident as a junior clerk. Not long after joining colleagues began asking me if I was going to take the exams? ‘What exams I thought?’ The subject of exams was not mentioned in the interview! However, there were salary increases for exam success, so I went along to Euston College evening classes for a couple of years without success.
It wasn’t until I was required to fill in forms for each of our underwriting files because we were being ‘computerised’. The office gossip was that computers would do a lot of the work clerks like me did and there would be fewer jobs in the future for people like me. The number of people working in insurance would reduce dramatically.
That’s when I began to convince myself that the future would be divided between computers which did the work and ‘thinkers ‘who decided on strategy and who told the computers what to do. So, I decided I had better stop messing around at pretending to study the subject of insurance and really put my back into it to become a ‘thinker’.
A few years later, I qualified as a Fellow of the CII and went on to take a Law Degree at University College London. I really did feel that I was now a thinker. Despite the growing use of computers, the number of people employed in insurance had grown, rather than fallen. The fears that inspired me to take the exams seriously proved to be unfounded.
So, your guess is as good as mine as to what effect AI will have on the insurance profession. Will the fears of reduced numbers employed be realised? Or will the numbers continue to increase, albeit in changed roles?
What goes round, comes around!
Reg Brown
