Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

Is AI Changing The World Of Insurance With Awais Farooq

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 367

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we delve into the transformative role of AI in the insurance industry with our special guest, Awais Farooq, a seasoned professional with nearly two decades of experience in claims processing.

Awais shares insights about how AI is revolutionizing the claims process, highlighting its potential to enhance customer experience by speeding up claims processing and reducing fraud. He discusses how AI assists in claims related to personal property and automobiles, and the importance of predicting and quickly responding to consumer needs in the insurance sector.

Notable Quotes:

  • "There is always a gap in claims processing. It’s a very human business, especially with personal property like homes and cars." - [Awais Farooq]
  • "AI is giving insurance companies an edge, allowing them to pay what's right and reduce fraud." - [Awais Farooq]
  • "We need technology to create that human connectivity. Our end goal shouldn't be robots interacting for us." - [Awais Farooq]
  • "A personalized experience through digital technology that understands you better than you understand yourself is where AI could potentially evolve." - [Awais Farooq]

Awais emphasizes the evolving role of AI in helping consumers make better-informed insurance decisions. He foresees AI as a tool not just for assisting with current claims but also for predicting future needs and risks, potentially paving the way for more personalized insurance solutions.

Connect with Awais Farooq:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awais-farooq/

Awais also shares his vision of a future where AI plays a role similar to 'Jarvis' from Iron Man, assisting individuals with personalized digital solutions.

If you're interested in how AI is reshaping the insurance industry and want insights from an expert in the field, this episode is a must-listen!

Connect with Jonathan Green

AI is changing the world of insurance, and we're gonna talk about it with today's special guest, Awais Farooq. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated T talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction, a IO, the trusted partner for AI Digital transformation. At fraction a IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the task. That matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to ai, ensuring you avoid policy mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio help you. Stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. So it's so great to have you here and connect with you. Awais. I know we had some technical issues, but we made it all work, guys, and we're all, everything's good now. I'm really fascinated by the approach because we often think about using AI customer face like an AI instead of a doctor, an AI instead of a therapist, but. Using AI and claims processing and doing paperwork, which is the thing we all hate doing. I think that's really one of the best use cases. So how did that kind of become your area of focus? Yeah, I don't, look, I've been in the claim space my entire career. It's been about almost two decades. I. And there's always a gap, right? It's a processing environment where you have a lot of different people looking at trying to get information on a particular event that's occurred, a situation where it's impacted someone's life, and it's a very human business, right? When you look at. Some of the other areas of claims, it's very transactional, but when you think about property and casualty, you're talking about people's homes. You're talking about people's cars, things that people use every single day. There's very high touch and frequency of trying to get information and figuring out when am I gonna get my car? Repaired what's going to happen with this stain that I have in my ceiling, right? It's the biggest, worst thing that can happen. You don't know as a homeowner you know what that means. Does that mean that your house is going to collapse or does it mean that it's just slight damage and it's just cosmetic? Or even if it's cosmetic, it bothers us because we look at it every single day. So it's. Really driven off of that and saying, how can you improve the customer experience of what people are feeling when they're transacting with other organizations, right? So when they're buying something for their home from Amazon, or they're going on a website and stuff shows up to their house within a couple of days, and then you go to the insurance process, you submit a claim, somebody's going to come out there in a couple of days, and then we will send you a check maybe a month, two months later for you to repair your home. So it's all about this. Instant response that now we as consumers are starting to get into. And that's what's it's fascinating to me that it's slowly starting to trickle into the insurance industry and there's a lot of work to be done. So I kind of wanna talk about the actual mechanic. So let's say you're in a car accident, your car gets damaged. There's all these questions, which is like, how much is it gonna cost? How much of it do I have to pay? Do I have to get a rent, like a loaner car, a rental car, while they're repairing it? All of these things. And. Long time ago, the process was you had to wait for the person to come out and look at your car. And then eventually they became like some mechanics were authorized to ask to give a real estimate. So you have to go to an approved auto shop. And I'm wondering now it's can you take a picture and the AI can assess it, and then I start to think yeah, what if you use an AI generated picture to trick the ai? Like how do you see that playing out? Yeah, a hundred percent. Look you're talking about this journey, right? That we've seen from handwritten estimates to now people going out there. You have virtual inspections of where you can do a real time, Hey, show me your car, what's happening, or submit your photos and we'll run it through the ai. Take a look at it. And then eventually you get to a point like the property, they're not, you're not gonna be able to estimate every single thing, right? What you don't know is what you don't know. You don't know what's going on under the carriage. It's going to be the actual repair individual trying to open that up and saying, okay, there's more damage, or There's less damage. But what it that does it, it gives you. Complete clear access to what the extent of that damage is before it's exacerbated. Or before it's made worse than what it was. So I think we're in the state of, as consumers trying to get immediate response. But on the insurance carrier side, I. It's also giving them an edge of saying, Hey, we're going to pay what's right. So you're gonna have less and less fraud of people. If you got rear-ended and you got a little bit of bumper damage, now you go in with a hammer and you try to push it in more, or whatever the case may be, and you go into other areas. So there's fraud element to it as well. And then, of course you get into the customer service experience, right? As soon as you know how much you owe. You should cut a check and move on. And I think that's what insurance companies are doing right now, which is fascinating because, I think it's, if you know it's at least $500 of damage or$5,000 of damage, you owe that and you getting that in front of customers hands. Build so much credibility with that consumer versus saying, Hey, let us figure out what it's going to be, and then we'll send you something and things are always gonna come up, right? And you, what you don't know is what you don't know. But with these AI models, you can start to predict and you're putting in, how fast were you going? Where did you get it rear-ended by? Was it a Tesla truck or was it a, a small small vehicle? Or was it a motorcycle? And all those things starting to factor up to saying. Hey, we predict this estimate to be X amount. Yeah, I think that's really interesting now that we can send the pictures to an AI and have that processing and start to have that quicker analysis.'cause the AI's very good at detecting something about this picture is weird. A couple of years ago when my wife and I rent a hotel for a few years, one of our guests, as often happens when people visit Asia, rented a motorcycle. Left braked it, which if you don't know, causes you to flip off. It broke his arm into 13 places. Ooh. And I was like, that arm's never gonna work again. It's not gonna work. You can put it back together, but that's a lot of breaks in one arm. And I heard him on the call, the insurance company. He had like really good travelers insurance. They sent a private plane to pick him up the next day. And his doctor was like really famous. I recognized her. You don't recognize a lot of doctors. I was like, what? But I remember he is on the phone and they were like, were you wearing a helmet? He was like, yes, definitely. I was like this, definitely not this guy. Definitely wasn't because it's interesting people sometimes they go on vacation, they go, oh, gravity's not the same here. It won't hurt. Like getting hit by a truck here doesn't hurt as much. I'm like, oh it hurts. Way worse. It does. So I just remember thinking about that and it was really interesting. But he had such a good insurance, they didn't even care. But he hadn't hit his head. He hit his arm, like he put his arm out, whatever. So it was really, that always sticks with me as like wild. But he had the right insurance and he hadn't hit his head. But there's so much in that process where people always they wanna tell the version of the story where it's the least their fault or whatever. It is interesting to think about someone hating their car with a hammer to get more da I've never thought of that. I don't know why you would do that. It's I've only had to deal with insurance for car damage twice in my life, and I'm like, I just want it fixed. Let's just get fixed as possible. But one of the big challenges is, and I wonder how much this relates, is like dishonesty at a mechanic. So I used to think, oh, if you go to the dealership and then the dealership, and this is 20 years ago. Asked told me I needed a bunch of things and I Googled 'em and like none of 'em existed. They weren't real words. And I was like, oh, okay. So even there, they charge you more and they make, they were like, oh, we gotta fix this and this. Oh yeah, this wire doesn't work. And it's like all words that aren't even real words. So what I wonder about is like you have 'em take a picture of all the damage in the insurance, so then, and the car model, what they should be billing you for as the insurance. Do you think it'll also cause a decrease in that part of the fraud from the mechanic or the like repair shops? Yeah. Wow. You unpacked a lot of stuff there from motorcycle and you gave me like a. Nostalgic moment. I personally had a motorcycle accident. I was wearing a helmet, a t-boned, a deer flew off the bike. Blacked out, right? And I think it's a traumatic experience, right? And same thing. They do a CT scan on you whether you, no matter what, they wanna make sure that your brain activity is appropriate. So even though you may not have had any damage to the brain. But I think just going back to that and you're, you brought that memory very visual for me. Thankfully, I did not break my bones in that many places, but I did have I did have some injury in my foot and things like that. But look, it, I think going back to it, I would say 99. Even to 99.9% of the folks that have a claim this is not off of any number. This is just my prediction, personal prediction of people are honest people, right? People just want to get back to their lives. Majority of the time. It's when you get into situations where people try to take advantage of it, there's, there could be a group of folks that, you call somebody a repair co, a repair person or something like that, and they're like, oh, insurance accident. Don't worry. We'll cover your deductible. We'll make sure you don't have to pay a penny. And then you find the same consumer in a state of Hey. I'm having to pay more money outta my pocket because you fixed things that you did not get paid for by the insurance company.'cause the insurance company is investigating. And there's this also notion on the consumer side that the insurance companies don't want to pay. And having been in this industry, as I said, close to two, two decades, I have not worked for a single insurance company that said we don't want to pay claims. There's a con, it's a contractual obligation to make sure that they are paying for what was purchased. And I think a lot of times people don't read hundreds of pages of policies to say what is covered, what's not covered, and how that's coverage is going to apply. And I think that's where the disconnect is, right? Then consumers think the insurance companies are out to get them. And insurance companies thinking that, this is gonna be fraudulent or whatnot. Believe it or not, there's very minimal fraud. It's smaller in number, but higher in the amount of money that gets into it. So I think that's where a little bit of disconnect from both consumer and insurance carriers exist. But to your point, I think it's about making sure you're providing that service as fast as you can to make sure you're doing the right thing. Like in your case with your friend, having to have a private airplane coming in, picking them up. Taking care of what they knew they needed to take care of.'cause you can't wait for that for days, right? It's, he's gonna be pain, he's gonna be in pain and misery and things like that. And I think sometimes we underestimate the power of what really is going on. And you get to purchase insurance and you never see what insurance will do for you until you need it. So your friend may have had that insurance for a decade and he never needed anything out of it. But at the same time, it's. When he needed it. They really showed up there. One of the things that's really challenging for the consumer is to figure out the right ratio. A lot of people have the wrong insurances. It's like there's that famous story of the 10 biggest financial losses in Vegas, where all things they weren't insured of. Like the Tiger attack, they were insured for the tiger to attack the audience, not the. Magicians, things like that. So it's very hard to predict. And so for a person who's looking at all these different insurance companies, all these different variables and like, how much cover do we need? What the right scenarios? It's very complicated because they think, how much can I afford? What's the right thing? What's the possibility of the scenarios? Do you see a place for AI can help people to make that decision? Because if you go to the websites and help you choose a plan. They're always gonna recommend whatever's the best affiliate commission for them. Unfortunately, there's a financial incentive. But if you can take an artificial intelligence, doesn't have, that financial incentive can help people to navigate, because a lot of people have like just the wrong type of insurance. Like the number of people in California who didn't have fire insurance, right? They had earthquake insurance.'cause earthquake are quite common there. It's always these different things like. Because the best thing for AI is like large data analysis. It can help you to plan it better. What's the most likely thing to happen to me? Do you see that as something coming down the pipeline? I think it's in works, right? I know of a couple companies that are in stealth mode trying to do a little bit of work on that consumer piece of educating and providing some support through AI to saying, Hey. Let us build a portfolio for you. Let us figure out what you need at what stage of your life right now. You have a kid, what you should you be focused on versus you just graduated from college and it's your first car, or you know this your first home and you or you have three homes, right? In different locations. It's not going to be all the same. And I think there's more and more products that are coming out and. AI is being very helpful in that space of trying to predict and help you mitigate, look, we as as humans, we have existed with or without insurance, hands down, right? I think where it starts to challenge is when we collect things and when we have. Valuable assets, or even if it's people around us. And I think we start to recognize what would that mean if you lost it. I see you have a bunch of guitars back there. If you had a, I, you probably have a really cool guitar back there that you. Wanted for your entire life, and it's worth a lot to you and a lot of money that you paid to buy it. And I think what would happen, if you did not have the right amount of coverage? I think it's assessing you, assessing yourself, and saying, look, how much can I take on? Every time when you're talking about insurance, there's always an element of self-insurance, right? Whether that's through deductible or self claim risk, what is, what are you willing to take? The insurance company will take the risk for you, and they'll ask you for a price. But then you yourself can take risk as well knowing that you will lose that thing and you may not have coverage or full coverage. And I think it's, it becomes very tricky and it's, there's no one answer for everyone. It's an individualized thing. Like when you go to Amazon, they're only if you had a baby, they're only gonna show you all the things about babies, right? Or if you are into golf and you search a couple of golf clubs and it's always gonna show you the, the latest clubs that they have or the bags and everything else that goes along with it. I think that's. That's how insurance is going to become, where you are going to have this client segmentation of what is your audience looking for? What is their profile looking as they progress in life? And I think, Gerber believe it or not, does a very interesting thing. They offer life insurance the as well. And they recognize, hey, you had a newborn and you should buy life insurance, or whatever the case is. And the dealers, are starting to pick on this and say. You just purchased a vehicle you probably are going to need insurance. So we have our own insurance agent right here. Let's get you before you walk out the door to be able to have insurance and things like that. So I think it's more about being in front of the. Being in front of the people to help them navigate through this, because most people see insurance as money that they're just throwing down the pipe, or down, down the drain. And it's very expensive. As you get, as you collect more and more assets, you're paying a lot of a lot of that, right? For your thing. And I think it varies for you. So if you're willing to take more risk, you may. You may be okay with paying a premium of 1% of your net worth versus if you're not willing to take enough risk, you'll pay up to five, 6% of your net worth and saying, no. I wanna make sure if something were to happen to me or something were to happen to the things I own. I want to, I want them replaced. Yeah. It's funny you brought up the guitars. These are actually trash. This is like a $60 guitar and a hundred dollars guitar for my kids. Because I approach risk management that way.'cause they're like, if you buy me a guitar dad, I promise I'll play it. I'm like, that's why it's covered in dust, that's why it's on my wall. It's like I played it once, but I'm reminded of this story when I was in high school and my friend went to buy drums. They're like, you can have drums for this price or cheaper drums with cases. And it's like the smart kids buy the cheaper drum with the case. But economists like the reason economists always get everything wrong is 'cause they always assume everyone makes logical decisions and the best is for themselves. It's yeah, I've never met anyone like that. Everyone buys what they want, not what they need. Yeah. So people are very bad at risk management. Like I have my approach to it, which is I. Cheaper guitars. It's so if I lose them, okay, so that's, but that's it. I really am interested in risk management. As someone who does consulting. I often talk about how the projects I take, risk management's a huge part of it. I look at how much money do I get up front versus how much money in the backend if the project works out. And so I always look at those ratios and a lot of people, that's where a lot of. New entrepreneurs and new consultants kind of mess things up is that they look all at the upside out potential downside. Which support part of risk management. So because people are illogical actors. That's what I'm wondering if AI can step in the gap and help them to make a more informed or logical decision because it's, the same thing where people buy the thing they're excited by without thinking about how, I need a cheaper version so that I can get the case or get the protection to decrease the risk of something happening. So do you think that's an area where we might start to see more in the future just because of the challenge of. Knowing what's the right insurance package for me and why should I do it? What is my risk and does my risk profile change? And what's based on my income and based on my things and what do I care about? There's a lot of complexity there. There's a lot of math, 'cause there's so many insurance companies, so many types of policies. Do I want life insurance or term life insurance? Do I want this? Do I wanna cover that? And it's like now we're seeing like, this is not me. But a lot of people have like pet insurance. I'm like, no, I have real kids. So it's like different. I have five kids, so I have a different Oh wow. A different approach to it. But you see that decision making calculus and it's like the thought of insuring, I'm like, it's cheaper to get a new dog to get insurance, which a lot of people think that's horrible sounding, but it's it's a, it's your perspective. Where are you on the spectrum, right? So that's kinda one of my questions is for people that struggle with the decision make or they're overwhelmed by information, it's if I said to you, recommend a camera to me, and you go, here's my five favorites. I go, that's not what I said. Just tell me which one to buy. Do you think there's something in there? Yeah. I think, look to your point, I think it's very difficult to make decisions on figuring out how much risk you want to take, right? As we think we want to take a lot more risk than what we're able to handle, because you only recognize what you risk until something happens to it if nothing happens to it. Like it's, it is what it is like, right? It's you're just, you're going to go through this phase of having. Something that impacts your life in a way. And I think as you were speaking, some of the things that came to my head is, how do we go through this decision factor of, what do we ensure? How do we ensure it? How much risk do we take? And I look at it, and I always, I give this example of where I think AI is going to go is it's going to be Jarvis, from Iron Man. When we get to that level of understanding of where we have our own profiles, where we have our own companion, that's. That knows things about us based off of, what we share with it and what it shares with us. It's going to evolve. That's what's going to evolve the space. Right now we're more conversational. We're asking it things that come up to our mind. I. And if you think about the brain activity, the amount of things that go through our brains is insane. The number of thoughts that go through it is okay, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to go travel here. I have to, purchase this and I'm thinking about saving for these things, whatever it may be. And when you have. When you have a personalized experience through digital technology that's understanding you better than you understand yourself because you're just blurbing out random thoughts as you're going through the car. And, I give this example of if you, current AI at the moment is more of a GPS when you know you're plugging it in and you're going from point A to point B and it can predict, hey, this is the fastest route, you should take this and this is what you need to do. What it doesn't recognize is you like coffee and it is 10:00 AM and you haven't had your coffee because you didn't tell it, you didn't have an had coffee. So you make a detour and you go to a coffee spot, or you do more of a scenic route versus the fastest route at this point, right? Because you don't have to get there till 11 o'clock or whatever the case is. It's starting to pick those things up and just recommending it to you. But that user experience has to be so smooth. So it will need to be something that understands you and your transitions in life, your behaviors, your reaction to things, and how, how willing are you to be able to take a risk in certain places, right? If you never want a bungee jump, right? If you that, that's something. Let's say you train in AI and say. I never ever want to take any risk. It jots it down. It's never going to recommend an adventurous sport where you're, diving off of a airplane. But at the same time, if something has changed in your life where you've faced your fear of heights and you're like, oh, you know what? I'm willing to give it a try. If you never tell it that, you're never going to understand that. You can predict the fact that hey, humans go through this curve of, being fearful of things and then facing their fears and coming, overcoming those. But it's, it changes for everyone. It's something that's the things that are in our brain that we cannot translate of why we feel certain things of how and when and where we feel them. I think that's a little bit of the gap, but it's gonna be closer as we engage more with technology. Excel, word. You look at all the Microsoft products, they are where they are. As a result of the feedback that's got, that they've received from customers, right? They said, Hey, I want it to be able to do more than just add two plus two. I want it to be able to look up stuff in a different table in Excel, for example, or I want to be able to consolidate all this information. Excel didn't come out with a pivot table right off the bat, right? It didn't come off with a lot of those tools that exist today or slicers and things like that where you can start to go so deep into the data. So I think it's. It's going to be that feedback that the technology's getting back and saying, this is what humans truly need once again versus what they want. What we want is somebody else to do everything for us. What we need is for us to do the things that make the most impact into our lives and what we're intending to do, which is that are we trying to get back time that way we can spend with our family, or are we trying to get time so that way we can increase our value in the stuff that we do. Yeah, I think that's really interesting because I always wonder, it's like AI can either make things a lot better or a lot worse, and I try to be on the hopeful side of things, which is that like it allows us to, get your claim paid out faster, decrease the amount of fraud, give you that better experience so you spend less time. I. Worrying about am I be able to get to work tomorrow? That's like the positive direction. I think that like increasing human interaction, 'cause the AI does the boring stuff is the good direction. And we see there's these two directions, right? One direction is oh, AI is gonna hand it by social media and do all the phone calls and basically replace human to human connection. And I hope that this leads us in that other direction, which is that. It's an assistive tool and that we actually have more human communication, better experience. We spend more time doing the things we love because ai, we'll do all this because one of the challenges, right? Like you, yeah, you have to fill out all the insurance claim form, but if you can explain to an AI what happened, and then it can translate it into the form, take a picture, all the parts.'cause it's one of the things I always find interesting is like you rent a car and you have to go around it. And say all the things that are damaged, that's really hard. So common to miss something. And that's one of the wild, like one of the wildest things. It's oh, if you didn't notice a ding before and you're like, was it there before? It's I don't know. I'm not an expert checking car panels. So it's if you scan it with an AI now that kind of solves that problem. So I think a lot of good things, and I think that this is very interesting. I think a lot of people are gonna find this interesting for people who are. Interested in kind of stuff you're talking about your approach to insurance and like maybe a better world. Where's the best place they can find you online and see the cool things that you're doing. Yeah, LinkedIn Connect with me on LinkedIn. I think it's a great platform. Reach out to me, share your ideas, thoughts with me and give me feedback on what you think about the stuff that is say, I'm passionate about building the future of claims and how we will interact, whether it's voice or anything else. To your point, I think it's all about making sure that we create that human connectivity, right? It's like that should be our end goal. Our end goal should not be that. We're just taking a seat back and not interacting with anybody, and robots are talking to each other and they're having transactions with each other, and we're just we're just in the middle of it. We are human and we need to interact with other humans to be successful. And we need to, there's something about shaking a hand, looking somebody in the eye and making a promise and saying, yes, I will do this for you. You can do the same thing and AI will promise you and it will do it, which is great, but there's not, there's just a. A little sense of disconnectivity, of, Hey, does this person understand me? When it needs to understand me, right? And you go through these ebbs and flows, I feel like there's going to be, technology is going to become so good. That it's not going to give us disappointment. And maybe we need disappointment to then recover back, right? You need this loop of going up and down. And I think everybody looks at it that we want, rainbows and roses all the time. But the reason where we succeed is actually when we fall and we start to lift back up and we say, Hey, thank you for being there for me. Thank you for helping me when I needed somebody the most. And I think it's it's a double-edged sword of where. You look at it and you say, AI can do all those things hands down and can do it. But I think in today where I'm at currently and looking at it and saying, I. Can it do that? I don't think, I could feel the same way if I spoke to Jonathan directly versus speaking to Jonathan ai. I think there's something about that, right? And it's, I think Jonathan gives me reactions and he is giving me some, cues of, hey, you're saying the right thing where you're saying the wrong thing versus the ai. I could train it to say, pep me up. And we actually, I was just at a conference and they did that. It's okay. I need a pep talk. And Chad, GPT came up with all these things and said, oh, you are great. You can do this and you can accomplish this. This is what you need to give the message to young leaders. And it was phenomenal. You walk outta that, you're like, wow, I'm inspired. This is great. I'm a perfect person. But then it doesn't, I. You don't recognize the faults in you and you just start to create this sense of personality that you are this greatest person, but then you know, we do have to become better. It's all about improving yourself over the li over the course of your life, so That's really interesting. I think that's amazing. I know people are gonna love this episode. I'll make sure to link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes and below the video on YouTube. Thank you so much for being here again today. Awais for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you for having me, and thank you everyone. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. 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