AI influences industrial property and Chinese consumer markets

Speaking ahead of the AI workshop, the chair of today’s session, Benedikt Hintze, risk and insurance manager at Georgsmarienhütte Holdings, said: “AI is an important new technology with the potential to change the entire market insurance market.”

AXA XL is lined up to discuss AI in industrial insurance and Funk Gruppe will introduce the widespread use of AI in Chinese consumer insurance.

Hintze said AXA XL’s session would be a case study on how the consultancy is using AI to support industrial risk management activity. “They will talk about property insurance and how AI is used there already to make predictive analysis. They are using AI to help their risk engineers to digest a lot of risk information, for example about factories, production processes and insured values. Then it can give focus to the risk manager about where to take action,” Hintze said.

In the past, industrial operators have targeted their risk actions on the larger properties and factories that draw the attention of the big insurers. Such factories are already highly protected by risk actions.

“AI can help to show how you should also look at the smaller factories, which can also have a high risk. I will be asking questions about how can you apply AI to industrial insurance. How can it help customers maybe also to put the right risk actions there where you need them,” Hintze said.

Funk Gruppe’s session is expected to draw on the first-hand experience of the speaker who has served in China.

“Our presenter is half-Austrian, half-Chinese. He has close relationships to China and gained experience of how China is using digital solutions to optimise the process involved in claims and to make settlements easier and faster,” Hintze said.

About 1.4 billion Chinese people participate in the private insurance market, purchasing insurances such as motor and health. The market has adopted a system whereby claims are uploaded by smartphone and AI is used to process and check the claim and then to transfer money to the claimant.

“This is really a big development in China and we will talk about whether this model is applicable to industrial insurance, or are we still in a market where there are not too many players? There might not be big companies and you cannot synergise like in China.

“And there is no data protection law in China, so my questions will say, okay, for us in Europe, it’s a big issue. The data protection directive was launched last year. How do we compare to the Chinese market — can we also have this system, or is our market in Europe not suited for it?,” Hintze said.