AI has the power to transform insurance, but as Suncorp CIO Adam Bennett discussed at the recent Australian Financial Review AI Summit, getting foundations right and keeping the customer in focus is vital for organisations who want to succeed.
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A year ago, I wrote about the notion of moving from experimentation with artificial intelligence to scale adoption of Gen AI. Twelve months on, it feels like we are on the precipice of yet another shift in gears. Having scaled our AI usage across the organisation, we are now exploring how we might be able to truly transform as we adopt Agentic AI and what that means for our customers, people and the broader community.
As we face into more frequent and severe extreme weather events, the value of insurance and its accessibility and affordability has never been more important. In a data-rich industry, AI has the power to reshape our end-to-end value chain. As one of Australia’s leading insurers, we see AI as an enabler to help us improve customer experiences, move faster and ultimately, help protect more customers.
For us, this includes everything from product innovation and recommendations for customers, sales and service interactions, underwriting, natural disaster preparation and response, and insurance claims assessment, validation and fraud detection.
Safety, integrity and trust – adopting AI ethically
For me, this is incredibly exciting, because you can see the technology come to life but very much through the lens of better experiences for our customers and people. This is the biggest ingredient that has allowed us to move from experimentation to scale. Our AI strategy has been entirely grounded on the improved outcomes we're looking to deliver to our customers and in the rock-solid core foundations around governance, risk management, and AI safety.
This isn’t something that sits in ‘the IT department’ – it’s intrinsic to our strategy, has top-down sponsorship and is being embedded enterprise-wide. Our safety approach ensures AI operates securely and ethically at scale. Our dedication to governance, transparency, and user trust was recognised at the Financial Review AI Awards last week, where Suncorp won in the Ethics and Responsibility category. This award reinforces real progress isn’t just about advancing AI capabilities, but doing so with integrity, transparency, and trust at the core.
(L:R): Aman Singhal (Suncorp Data Governance Advisor, Data Gov, AI Safety & Ops), Marty Mayhew (Suncorp Executive Manager Data Gov & Service Delivery), Priyanka Paranagama (Suncorp Chief Technology Officer & EGM, AI Transformation), Julie Weber (Suncorp Manager, AI Solutions), Ashlea Stewart (Suncorp Product Owner, AI Solutions), Jeff Lee (Suncorp Sr Data Scientist, AI & Data Science), Mark Hiscocks (Suncorp Principal Data Scientist, AI & Data Science).
AI in action at Suncorp
We’ve already deployed hundreds of AI and machine learning models across the business and have multiple Gen AI use cases running. From reducing the number of questions we need to ask when we sell a home insurance policy, to making knowledge more accessible to our people, to optimising our supply chain, there’s been some excellent examples of how we’re making it easier to do business with us.
But it’s when disaster strikes that we’ve really been able to bring together an enormous number of the AI and technology capabilities we have developed over the last 12 to 24 months. Even before the rain starts falling or winds start whistling, we can overlay predicted weather patterns with our customer information to allow us to proactively message customers, prepare our people and suppliers. It helps us to be ready to respond with the right people in the right places, as quickly as possible. We’re able to pay claims faster, get people back home sooner and our people can focus on the more complex claims and customers who need us most.
For anyone unfortunate enough to be impacted by severe weather, they will know the recovery can take many months and involve working closely with our claims managers and suppliers.
Suncorp CIO Adam Bennett
Now, thanks to AI, our claims managers can access a simplified summary of a claim, reducing the time spent looking for information and increasing the accuracy and quality of their customer interactions as they provide updates on the claim’s progress.
The human connection – empowering our people
Of course, none of the benefits for customers will be realised without bringing our people on the journey. We acknowledge that our ability to embed AI across the organisation will be our competitive advantage, not the technology itself. We are shifting our mindset and uplifting our capability by providing both targeted and organisation-wide initiatives, tackling reskilling, upskilling, educational and inspirational angles. This has ranged from leadership courses, virtual conferences, hackathons, or intensive job-reskilling programs for selected individuals.
Our people have shown tremendous enthusiasm in AI, with thousands of our employees participating in these opportunities. I see that will only continue given almost all roles will be working with AI in some capacity.
While insurance is incredibly data-driven, it’s the human element that is most important. In our business, we’re generally dealing with people who have experienced a loss, damage to their home or possessions, and in some instances, they may have suffered physical impairment or even tragedy. We understand and never lose sight of the incredible responsibility we have to support these people in the moments that matter, because while the technology may change, our purpose and unrelenting focus on our customers will not.
Suncorp, across our various brands, manages tens of thousands of claims every year. Claims managers often work across a variety of claims and are the primary contact for our impacted customers to support them through the repair or recovery process.
Our Single View of Claim (SVOC) initiative uses GenAI to create a simplified, easy to digest view of the claim status for our people and summarises next steps to progress the claim.
Using an internal facing web-application it has reduced the time claims managers spend searching across systems, resulting in between five and 30 minutes saved per claim review depending on claim complexity.
This means our teams are getting across important information, reducing the need for customers to repeat themselves, and we can more quickly action next steps, ultimately aiming to get people back into their homes, back to work or back on the road faster.
We initially launched SVOC in our home claims area, and more recently expanded the initiative across our business.
So far, SVOC has processed 2.738 billion words across these two areas, producing around 1.8million claim summaries. That’s the equivalent of reading the Harry Potter book series (all seven books!) 2,530 times.
