CRM & sales are the most impacted areas with Gen AI: ACKO’s Vishwanath Ramarao

Emerging technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI) presents a massive opportunity for the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. To this end, Bengaluru-based insurtech company ACKO, is leveraging digital technologies to increase speed, efficiency, and to improve cost, as well as also planning to offer these services in a SaaSified manner to other players in the industry, said Vishwanath Ramarao, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Acko, in an interview with TechCircle. Edited excerpts:

What differentiation does ACKO offer over other insurance providers on the technology front?

Most insurance companies conduct business through intermediaries but we operate as a direct-to-consumer digital insurance company. This means that while other companies in the industry utilise vendor technologies that have been assembled from various providers, we have homegrown technology, making it easier to operate, maintain and scale our systems. Think of it as an AWS equivalent. The idea is to offer more agility, faster development and more flexibility. After initial years of complexity building this technology, 5-7 years later, our intellectual property has started yielding results. We will be now introducing ACKO Cloud based on our proprietary technology to other players in the industry in a SaaSified way. 

What are the main pain points where digital technologies can prove helpful in the insurance industry?

There are two main areas. To begin with, it is a common complaint that the claims process is excruciatingly slow due to the obvious verification, operational, and regulatory challenges. Now the industry is moving towards auto adjudication, which basically automation of the claim settlement process on the back of technologies such as machine learning, machine processing, and artificial intelligence. This allows easy and quick collection of data, its analysis, and decision-making on top of checks and balances. 

The other focus area is bringing the entire ecosystem together. We see this ecosystem integration, which is a very big challenge for insurance companies, especially somebody like ours who not only serves as an insurance wallet but also serves as the service provider. So building a service layer at scale involves bringing together data, conversational AI, and other transformative technologies together is important.

How are you leveraging generative AI technology?

Usually customer relationship management and sales are the most impacted areas with generative AI. Today, a lot of our customer relationship management has gone through a bit of re-architecture as a result of the generative AI. We’re getting increasingly sophisticated in a way that humans don’t need to be involved when it comes to addressing customer queries.

Our lab tests indicate that the tech now has reached a point where it's much more natural for the customer to talk to a chatbot and get an appropriate response. We are trying to find answers for questions like quality of chatbot conversations, how do they compare to natural conversation, how is the chatbot learning and evolving. So we've been fine-tuning these generative AI for the last six months now. You'll see the first set of deployments probably in January next year.