Tatjana Lalkovic, CTO at Definity, sets stage for AI

When Tatjana Lalkovic joined property and casualty insurer Definity as its chief technology officer in 2020, one of her first tasks was to prepare its digital platforms for its future as a public company. Four years later, those improvements have set the stage for performance improvements and new applications of artificial intelligence at the company.

Definity, founded as a mutual company in Canada 153 years ago, went public in 2021. As the company was preparing for its initial public offering, Lalkovic says, she focused on making its digital platforms capable of managing continued company growth and adding future capabilities.

There was also the increased scrutiny that comes with having public company investors. “Your operating technology structure has to be a lot more robust, from delivering finance and HR robust platforms in the cloud to ensuring that your platforms are so much more resilient and your uptime is higher,” she says. Any downtime hurts the company’s reputation with investors and cuts into its performance.

Cybersecurity for Definity “was lifted to another level,” Lalkovic says, along with implementing a new finance system. By 2023, Definity had moved its core insurance platform to the cloud—the first insurance company in Canada to do so, she says.

“That enabled us not only to have higher resiliency and availability of the systems, but the ability to scale those systems infinitely, practically, with growth,” she says. “Thinking about how to set up for the future enabled agility in delivery to introduce new capabilities and innovate and respond to the changing market–as well as technology–much faster.”

Changes to the digital platforms led to several measurable performance improvements, Lalkovic says. Quotes to the company’s broker channel increased by 4%, the direct-to-consumer quote deliveries were faster, downtime was significantly reduced and the deployment time to introduce software and new capabilities improved by 60%.

“If you want to be a digital leader in the industry, your ability to quickly deliver better experiences, better service, better responses to changes in economy and pressures and challenges in the industry—is really, really critical,” she says.

Lalkovic also saw opportunities for the company to put its data to work. “The insurance industry is privileged to have such huge access to data,” she says. “That data you have can improve your business; improve your customer experience; respond to the market.”

By correlating separate sets of data—a customer’s personal insurance policy data with third-party data and claims data, for example—the company can create insights about that customer’s insurance risk and policy pricing.

She also saw opportunities to use AI. In 2022, Lalkovic formed a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to build a data platform that could be tapped by AI programs. That set the stage for several active and planned deployments of AI by the company. 

Two of the applications of AI went live in 2023: Call Summarization, which listens to and summarizes call-center interactions, and Customer Authentication, which verifies a caller’s identity based on biometric or other data without involving the human call agent.

Call Summarization AI provides the human phone agent with a running transcript and summary during a call with a customer or broker, so the phone agent doesn’t have to take notes and can focus more on servicing the customer. The summary is automatically added to the customer relationship management system, so the time spent updating the system at the end of the call has been reduced by more than 3 minutes on average; previously it took 3 to 5 minutes.

Two other Definity AI programs are imminent. Agent Assist AI listens to the topics mentioned during a call and then gathers relevant information from the company’s data platform that could help the human phone agent answer questions. “Now I have a coach, an assistant, that is pulling the information for me, rather than me logging into the different systems, pulling the data while I’m talking to the customer or broker,” Lalkovic says.

Customer Sentiment Analysis AI analyzes the large volume of email and call interactions between customers and Definity’s employees during the claims process. If the AI picks up on the sentiment of urgency or frustration from one customer—which a human might not be capable of discerning—that customer can be prioritized for special attention.  

Restructuring and consolidating the company’s data in the cloud provided the foundation for the AI programs, Lalkovic says. 

“You really have to have a robust platform and consolidation of the data so you can build effective models and insights and leverage AI and machine learning to drive innovation in your business,” she says.