The UK insurance industry is racing to adopt artificial intelligence, but many firms do not know how to implement it successfully or what the risks are. This project works directly with leading insurers to map where AI can transform underwriting, claims processing, and customer engagement, and to identify the organisational and industry-wide barriers that slow adoption. If successful, the research will produce practical tools—such as readiness assessments for individual firms and strategic recommendations for policymakers—that help insurers automate routine tasks, share data securely, and separate risk analysis from customer service. That could make insurance cheaper and faster for businesses and individuals, while keeping London competitive as a global insurance hub. The project does not develop new AI technology; it studies how to make existing AI work in a heavily regulated, tradition-bound industry.
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Financial and insurance services contribute more than 7% of UK national income and over one million jobs, with around one third of this employment in insurance. London is the leading global centre for specialist commercial (re)insurance broking and underwriting, with a wide range of specialised skills that supported the writing of £60 billion of gross written premium in 2013. Exports of insurance and pension services were £17.6bn in 2016, some 7% of total services exports. Our project investigates the opportunities and challenges for the UK insurance industry arising from the application of the new Ai technologies, including machine learning, distributed ledger, automated processing and the explosion of available data for business analytics and modelling including from social media and the connections emerging to the 'internet of things'. We will explore the implications for the insurance industry of this wave of new digital technologies, with the support of many of the UK's leading insurance companies. We will identify and map the range of opportunities for AI based innovation in business processes and business models, across underwriting and risk analytics, claims processing and customer engagement. We will examine, through engagement with industry on business opportunities and challenges and through a range of case studies, the barriers to adoption and the enablers of change. We will examine these barriers and enablers both from organisational and industry wide perspectives. At the organisational level we will examine the requirements for successful innovation ("critical success factors") and develop organisation wide assessments of their readiness for adoption. At the industry level we will examine new emerging ways of providing insurance services, including the possibilities for transformative change in insurance value chains, for example with separation of risk and underwriting from customer engagement, and the potential for sharing of services and data. Finally from these organisational and industry investigations we will develop strategic and policy analysis and recommendations, identifying the steps required from firms and from policy makers to support the adoption of AI technologies and ensure that these support automation and efficiency gains in UK insurance industry and benefit insurance customers. A distinctive feature of our project is our deep industry engagement, offering us the opportunity to engage with practitioners across the full range of business functions: in strategic roles; in specific business areas across product lines and operational processes; in risk analytics; and in technology. These contacts will support a range of case studies of the deployment of AI in insurance and also interview, survey and forum style empirical investigations to achieve the full understanding from both these organisational and industry perspectives.
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