Is AI a threat to underwriting talent?

There’s a common perception in the Canadian property and casualty insurance industry that artificial intelligence (AI) will take your job rather than support it.

But the opposite is true, as AI empowers talent transition in underwriting, says Pat Caldwell, chief people officer at insurtech Send. AI-driven large language models are changing how underwriters perform their roles, providing the ability to reduce manual data entry underwriters would have previously had to sort through, he explains.

AI also helps facilitate faster information and knowledge transfer about policy coverages, underwriting rules, and industry terminology during the onboarding of new talent. For newer policy models, AI can help retrieve the latest data and expedite education during onboarding to give new hires almost immediate access to the information they need.

This helps new hires improve their skill sets, increase their data fluency, and elevate their data literacy, Caldwell says.

Some of the more experienced underwriters might not even be familiar with parametric, usage-based or embedded systems, Caroline Bedford, CEO of education and development company EDII, said during a Send webinar, Finding and Keeping the Best Underwriting Talent. This enables “analytical talent data natives coming into the market” to independently learn from AI.

Caldwell also presented during that webinar in May. He tells Canadian Underwriter it’s natural for people to assume worst-case scenarios when it comes to AI.

“In the absence of any clarity around how AI might impact us, people will create their own,” he says. “So, it’s very human of us to leap to the worst possible outcome, which is that AI is a threat to our jobs!

Learning from the past

“However, if we can learn anything from technological revolutions of the past, while some roles may disappear, the vast majority of what we will experience as individuals will be roles that start to shift in knowledge and skills over time, and new roles and ways of working being introduced that capitalize on the opportunities that technology presents.”

Caldwell was responding to CU‘s question about how you can convince insurance industry professionals that AI is there to augment their jobs rather than take them away.

“Telling someone that being able to get access to different knowledge and skills through AI tools is one thing, but having them feel like it’s supporting their role, not threatening, can actually be another thing,” he said during the webinar.

Caldwell believes a significant component of the change curve over the next decade will be a pendulum in which AI is viewed as a threat rather than an opportunity.

“One of the most powerful questions we can be asking is based on what we do each day, how might AI help us to be even better at our role?” he asks. “This is an important reframe away from AI ‘taking work away from us’ to AI ‘allowing us to spend less time doing low-value, repetitive work and more time doing complex, high-value work.’”

It’s all about understanding AI’s capabilities and how it can support evolving how we work. “The industry professional who can identify when and how to leverage the capabilities of AI and successfully deploy that as part of their role becomes far more valuable to any organization than the technology itself,” Caldwell says.