My car

Meet Watson, the AI making your life easier

4 May 2018

The kids of today may not be able to comprehend this, but there was a time when people didn’t have smartphones, the internet couldn’t answer questions immediately and reading a paperback book was the best technology a busy person could ask for.

Nowadays, your mobile phone is always ringing and pinging, people are poking you on social media and you are contstantly being flooded with emails. It can feel like you don’t have a moment to yourself.

The world is changing and you need every minute of the day to get by. We know how busy life can get, that’s why we have just made your life a little bit easier when you need it most.

If you have been one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have unfortunately been involved in an automotive accident and needed to make a claim, it may have taken days to lodge your claim, have it processed, reviewed and approved. But for Suncorp Insurance customers, life just got a lot easier.

Suncorp Insurance receives more than 500,000 motor insurance claims every year, and in partnership with IBM, have introduced the next generation of artificial intelligence and customer service.

It is now possible to complete the claims process in just a few minutes. That’s right, minutes. But how, you ask?

Let us introduce Watson.

In 2017, Suncorp Insurance set out to revolutionise the claims process, where wait times were no longer an issue, and Suncorp Insurance’s Customer Service consultants could better use their time to help you with more complicated claims. That’s why Suncorp Insurance has introduced the ‘zero-touch’ process, where your claim could be done online in minutes.

“We wanted to create a process, which gave customers the ability to make their claim online, quickly and simply,” says Suncorp CEO of Insurance Gary Dransfield.

“Since we implemented the system in June, Watson has been doing an excellent job. Claims are being finalised in as little as five minutes.”

Watson is so smart, it is able to understand slang such as ‘bingle’, ‘crunched’ and ‘slammed’.

“Customers can now lodge their claim online, receive the outcome, pay any excess, and choose their repairer – all within five minutes.”

Like any new technology, Watson will become more intuitive over time, however, in the event the system cannot confidently process the claim, your case will automatically be sent to a consultant to pick up the conversation. Since launch, Watson has been able to complete 90% of claims.

“This is a unique application of artificial intelligence that directly impacts the lives of everyday Australians, while helping Suncorp Insurance’s team focus their time on the more challenging incidents” says Mark Allaby, Managing Partner at IBM.

“Suncorp Insurance is fast becoming one of the leading Australian organisations for digital innovation and technology.”

Check out the video below with Jason Leonard from IBM and Suncorp’s manager of Digital and Integration, Christine Tomikawa.

Christine Tomikawa: Suncorp currently lodges over 500,000 claims a year. We do know from experience obviously customers would like to get their cars back quicker. So the sooner we can do that the better.

Customers can now go online and lodge their claim, determine the outcome, pay any applicable excess and nominate a repair time and location of their choosing all within that one seamless transaction which is great.

Jason Leonard: The integration approach to implement Watson into the Suncorp process was to look at how the claim process works today, take a look at historical claims over the years and see how they were assessed.

Watson then essentially replicates that process by applying the same rules via a machine learning approach.

Watson works by understanding information in the same way that a person does unlike traditional computers that are used to dealing with ones and zeros - Watson can understand things like the English language and all the nuances of it.

So therefore, can help with things like motor accident claims.

Christine Tomikawa: We built a decision-making engine which essentially determines liability through an algorithm.

It uses a lot of business rules to ensure that we’re preventing errors or that we’re preventing fraud.

So what Watson does is enables us to process more claims online and gives our call centres some time back to focus on customer service and how we’re dealing with those really complex claims and what we can do to make those experiences much easier for our customers.

Insurance is issued by AAI Limited ABN 48 005 297 807 trading as Suncorp Insurance. Please read the relevant Product Disclosure Statement before making any decision regarding this product