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Graeme Dean, VP of Global Insurance Solutions in Partnerships at Cover Genius, kicked off his session by delving into the history of artificial intelligence (AI), noting that examining the past offers insights into the future. He highlighted the rapid evolution of computers in a relatively brief period, emphasising their now indispensable role in our daily lives.

Dean showcased a chart illustrating the evolution of AI technologies’ speed and advancement over time. The chart revealed that since 2010, AI has started to match and even surpass human capabilities in five domains: handwriting recognition, speech recognition, image recognition, reading comprehension, and language understanding.

He discussed the benefits of AI in the travel industry, underscoring the potential for creating new innovative applications as well as a more efficient, personalised, and secure experience.

Dean highlighted the following uses of AI in travel today:

• Dynamic pricing
• Upselling and cross-selling to understand future customer behaviours
• Predict behaviours and activities on-site
• Facial recognition for contactless boarding passes and added security
• Chatbots for FAQs and enhanced customer service
• Embedded and tailored protection.

Regarding embedded insurance, he said that AI boasts an opportunity to offer unique embedded protection. He outlined the following benefits of tailored protection with AI backed capabilities:

• It enables partners to deliver tailored travel protection that can be dynamically bundled or unbundled
• It can utilise real-time and historical data for individual users to offer the most relevant protection
• It allows co-creating global solutions for any source and destinations – all through a single application programming interface (API).

Additionally, Dean mentioned that AI provides the opportunity to reduce claim handling time, and ensure a rapid resolution time and instant payouts.

He went on to speak about the future of AI in travel and said benefits could include:

• Tailored protection: seamless experience and refund process with few questions asked
• AI-backed optimisation of pricing and deductibles: fair customer outcomes and higher core conversions
• Dynamically bundled or unbundled protection offerings: fit any type of experience
• Predictive analysis of protection needs: AI-driven insights into customer behaviours.

To conclude, Dean emphasised that AI is already proving its worth in enhancing the travel insurance industry, particularly in streamlining processes and detecting fraud. However, he acknowledged that there is still considerable ground to cover. The main takeaway is the promise of delivering a significantly improved customer experience through AI-driven advancements.