When it comes to AI, the most frequently heard phrase across the insurance industry is: “I’m not sure where to start.”

We spoke with many insurance executives who are eager — and sometimes required — to incorporate AI into their businesses, yet they don’t know how.

They’re open-minded and interested in AI, but they’re unsure how to take the first step.

I totally understand. AI can seem like a massive undertaking, especially in an industry like insurance that deals with complex regulatory and compliance needs. AI encompasses so many possibilities for innovation that it’s natural to feel overwhelmed about where to begin.

In my opinion, most people are thinking too big, which creates pressure and leads to inaction.

AI often feels intimidating because it’s marketed as something that will completely revolutionize the way we work and do business. That’s the promise we’ve heard, right? “AI will change everything.”

But transformation doesn’t have to mean a massive overhaul.

When incorporating AI, you should look for small changes that can make a big impact.

Find the Lowest-Hanging Fruit: Small Changes, Big Impact

Consider the smallest change to your or your employees' daily workflows that would make the greatest impact on productivity and job satisfaction.

Chances are, AI can transform this small pain point into a massive improvement.

“There’s the most potential ever to develop technology to alter the most micro-aspects of our day in our most local contexts,” writes Dan Fisher in the Gitwit AI Manifesto. “When we pressure ourselves to think about a farther-out future devoid of real-world contexts, this disconnects us from the narrow details of workflows and customer experiences. AI technology gets all the buzz, but it is at the level of the human in their daily flow that is the secret to unlocking real value.”

In other words, you don’t need to revamp your entire operation to innovate. Instead, focus on the challenges within your workflows that could be greatly improved with AI:

• What tasks are filled with manual work and prone to errors?
• What processes create bottlenecks because they’re time-consuming?
• What tasks do your team members dread the most?

The ‘Juiciest’ Low-Hanging Fruit in Insurance? Claims

When we set out to create Agentech, we spent hours conducting research with insurance teams. They all pointed to claims workflows as this lowest-hanging fruit—a critical yet chaotic part of the insurance process bogged down by time-consuming, manual, and menial tasks.

We went deeper. What specific task within the claims workflow required manual work and created bottlenecks?

Claims handlers identified the culprit: making sense of the disparate information necessary to process a claim.

This step checked all the boxes for being the “lowest-hanging fruit for AI”:

• Tedious and exhausting processes include an average of 200+ clicks across 7 disparate systems, downloading spreadsheets, etc. spanning 20 minutes. ✔️
• It was a manual process that required adjusters to comb through 50+ documents per claim—documents that were unstandardized, messy, and hard to read. ✔️
• It created a bottleneck, with claims handlers spending nearly an hour on this step alone for each claim. ✔️
• Adjusters hated this task because it was tedious and didn’t leverage their expertise. ✔️

Automating the claims preparation process helps insurers minimize claim backlogs while increasing claims volume—all without needing additional labor.

Agentech addresses the lowest-hanging, juiciest problem in insurance. Contact us to see a demo, it's definitely worth the squeeze!