Insurance professionals may be getting antsy about losing their jobs to machines, but London School of Economics professor of technology Leslie Willcocks said that it will not necessarily take away jobs.
“In the longer term, (automation) means people will have more interesting work…The evidence is that it’s not whole jobs that will be lost but parts of jobs, and you can reassemble work into different types of job,” Willcocks told McKinsey associate partner Xavier Lhuer in an interview.
The interview is part of a broader report by McKinsey on how technology will transform the insurance industry.
Willcocks spoke specifically on robotic process automation (RPA), which he says, “takes the robot out of the human,” specifically by performing “repetitive, routine tasks that are dreary and uninteresting.”
Furthermore, he defines RPA as a type of software that frees humans to perform other tasks requiring human qualities such as “emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment and interaction with the customer.”
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One example he cited is a case study of an insurer that was able to reduce the processing times of 500 premium advice notes from a two day average to 30 minutes. Willcocks explained that the insurer automated parts of the process except for the ability to structure data, which requires cognitive intelligence. However, he said, eventually, RPAs can perform 90% to 95% of the work involved in the task through machine learning.
RPA is attractive, not only because it makes processes more efficient and accurate, but because of the financial gains as well. Willcocks said that in his institution’s study of 16 organizations that have adopted RPA, return on investment ranged from 30% to 200% in one year.
“But it’s wrong to look just at the short term financial gains,” he emphasized.
Willcocks noted that RPA simplifies compliance processes for banks and insurers. It also improves customer service because the technology frees up staff to deal with the more complex transactions. Another benefit is that it allows insurance firms to keep up with the “exponential increase in data” and ease employee workloads.
“It will be disruptive but organizations should be able to absorb that level of change. The relationship between technology and people has to change in the future for the better and I think RPA is one of the great tools to enable that change,” he concluded.
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