Responsible use of artificial intelligence will change the role of brokerage customer service representatives (CSRs), rather than replacing them, by effectively placing humans in the position to train, assess and monitor the AI interaction with consumers.
“Instead of being dominated by intelligent machines, people now guide them based on human experience, perception, and expertise,” say Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson, and Karthik Narains in a blog for harvard business review. “In fact, ChatGPT and its predecessors were trained with a technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and its developers continue to refine it based on how people use it online.
“As one of the ChatGPT developers said Technology Review, ‘It’s ChatGPT’s secret sauce. The basic idea is to take a large language model with a tendency to spit out whatever it wants… and tweak it by teaching it what types of responses human users actually prefer.
Use of AI in U.S. brokerages is more advanced than use of AI in Canadian brokerages, says Canadian MGA space executive Canadian underwriter last week.
In 2018, an industry source said Canadian Subscriber: “There has been a lot of anticipation that technology will start to eliminate certain roles and that the numbers required in the industry to ‘mix the paper’ will become redundant.” A Canadian insurance broker said several years ago that he believed the junior underwriter role could be completely automated. Already in 2017, the CEO of a Canadian P&C insurance company predicted that 30-40% of the industry’s workforce could be automated by 2027.
But how much of that materialized has not been quantified.
In 2021, McKinsey & Company, which provides business insights to global managers, released a report on how AI could change the insurance distribution channel by 2030.
“Enough information is known about the individuals [customer] behavior, with AI algorithms creating risk profiles, so cycle times to complete the purchase of an auto, commercial or life policy will be reduced to minutes or even seconds,” the report states. of McKinsey & Company. “Car and home carriers have enabled instant quotes for some time, but will continue to refine their ability to issue policies immediately to a wider range of customers as telematics and Internet of Things (IoT) devices move into the home. proliferate and pricing algorithms mature”.
So, will brokers’ customer service representatives (CSRs) be replaced by robots? Not so fast, say the authors in their HRB blog.
McKinsey’s study focuses on the ability of AI to collect, synthesize and process large amounts of data. But while some human tasks can be automated, others cannot. Humans will still play a role in serving customers in the future, even if it is by continuously monitoring and training generative AI solutions to better serve customers, the HRB authors point out.
Four human tasks of CSRs cannot be replaced by AI, the HRB authors note, including arranging customer-facing environments and directing organizational operations, activities and procedures.
Generative AI, on the other hand, can completely automate the pricing of goods and services and the collection of payments.
But human CSRs and AI will still need to work together on five other tasks, including responding to customer issues or requests; provide information to guests, customers or customers; and promoting products or services.
Human CSRs will essentially perpetually train generative AI solutions on how to best support human customers.
“In the realm of customer service, the advent of generative, human-guided AI will require higher-order cognitive work like judgment, insight, moral reasoning, and innovation,” observe bloggers from HBR. “It’s a far cry from following scripts or handing clients over to other, more capable CSRs.
“Much of this higher-order work will be focused on maintaining, monitoring, and improving the performance of generative AI itself. Since the CSRs are simultaneously using the system and evaluating its performance, their internal radar must always be on.
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