This text is part of the special section Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity
The possible applications of artificial intelligence in the insurance field are endless; to explore them, the company Intact Financial Corporation has been working since 2019 in partnership with researchers from Laval University.
At Intact, telephone conversations between agents and customers are recorded; robots then generate the transcriptions, which are analyzed by employees. “We have all the calls in text form that we can navigate and thus find opportunities for training and improvement of our processes based on what is really happening there,” explains André Lapointe, senior director, data sciences at Intact.
“In addition, transforming all these calls into texts allows us to validate the information in the context of a complaint or to detect fraud. These tools that we have implemented for several years have given us a lot of productivity gains,” adds the manager.
AI is at the heart of Intact’s activities; of the company’s nearly 30,000 employees, more than 5,000 are part of its data science teams. However, despite this impressive workforce, distributed notably in Quebec, Ontario and Hong Kong, the Canadian company believes it needs the help of external experts. “This area is moving so quickly that it’s impossible to do everything alone,” puts forward André Lapointe.
To develop digital solutions or answer more complex questions, Intact relies on the expertise of the Intelligence and Data Institute (IID). “Our mission is really to go into production as quickly as possible with our artificial intelligence projects. There are a lot of scientific uncertainties that we, internally, are not going to attack […]because it’s too risky [financièrement] », he adds.
While Intact partners with several faculties, its largest partnership remains with Laval University. She gave him two million in 2019, which enabled the start of a collaborative research and development project and the creation of two chairs (one in teaching and the other in research) dedicated to the study and deployment of the potential of artificial intelligence and big data in the field of insurance.
Researchers and students in actuarial science, statistics, geomatics, computer science and ethics are among them. They work closely with Intact. Many have access to the information the company has on its customers. “We thus have real data that we can process to advance science,” underlines the professor in the Department of Geomatics Sciences at Laval University, Thierry Badard, who also directs the research.
A little revolution
AI not only helps businesses, but also consumers, according to Thierry Badard. To illustrate his point, he uses a concrete example: in the past, statistical models had determined that a 17-year-old young man owning a sports car was more likely to find himself at the center of an accident; consequently, even if the latter adopted irreproachable behavior on the road, he was automatically forced to pay a high insurance premium to protect himself.
However, this is no longer the case today, he continues. From now on, insurers are aware of his good driving reflexes: they are able to scrutinize his braking, his acceleration, to know that he never uses his phone while driving, and thus offer him more attractive monthly payments.
And if Intact, but also Desjardins, Bélair and company know the behavior of their customers, it is by collecting their GPS data and examining it using artificial intelligence. “Because all this geolocation information, a human could not process it or analyze it. Imagine a point taken every nanosecond and so on, for each customer, over a number of years, that’s a lot of data to dig through,” says Thierry Badard.
3 million for the Intelligence and Data Institute
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.