"Even as economists continue to grapple with the productivity puzzle, the key takeaway for us is to remain focused on innovation without the fear of technology killing jobs. Such fears have existed in the past. What got us through then, and will get us through this current wave, is the continued effort to invent and innovate."
Taimur Baig, in INSEAD Knowledge January 2018
There is evidence in the insurance world that such innovation is delivering the long hoped for productivity increase. This happened when the whole claims process was digitised &b combined with augmented intelligence i.e. automating simple tasks and letting people focus on important matters where intuition and good decision making make a big impact e.g.
- Delivering 200% to 500% productivity increase in Property & Casualty Insurance call centres
- Savings of 10% to 13% from indemnity costs
- Voluntary walkaways of 30%b or more ( previously undetected fraud)
- Settlement costs reduced by 15% to 20%
- Claim life-cycle reduced 40%
- Customer satisfaction increasing
This is achieved when the whole customer experience and claims process is redesigned to exploit digital claims platforms to
- Let customers manage their own claim online
- Accessing, joining & analysing structured and unstructured data
- Extending transformation to insurance services i.e. the supply chain
- Exploiting all three rather than innovation product by product and market by market
In the midst of a tech boom, productivity growth is slowing. Is the global economy simply gathering strength, or is innovation becoming elusive? In his seminal 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University made a provocative claim—compared to the five waves of technological shifts of the past (electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and modern communication), the economic impact from ongoing IT developments is downright ordinary.