Remember the 1980s? “Claims will be done by a computer”. “Most claims professionals will be out of a job”. “Those left will see how they work and do business change radically”. “Our market as we know it and the relationships that underpin it will cease to exist”. “Shoulder pads will be with us for ever”.

Fast forward to the 90s – a new technology broadly termed ‘the internet’ had just taken off. Instead of reams of paper, you now had unlimited access to all the information you liked at the touch of a button. Emails slowly started replacing letters, and texts and mobile phones replaced calls and landlines. Doomsayers predicted that insurance claims and the people who had made it a career would cease to exist. Or at least there would be a lot fewer of us. But instead, something else happened, the market just got a lot bigger.

The advent of the internet and mobile technology did change things – in fact, it made us better. It helped us access information instantly and operate globally with colleagues and brokers around the world. It made us closer – worldwide communications could happen in an instant. But it did not replace what we did or how we did it. Understanding our partners and building trust was just as important as it had been before.

Fast forward to today, and we are seeing similar handwringing. Artificial Intelligence will “make us redundant”. AI will make the personal relationships on which our industry depends outdated and superfluous. The bots will take over. But I have a different perspective, and these predictions do not tell the whole story.

And I do not doubt the potential of AI - it is immense, with huge potential in the workplace. It will act as an enabler, automating basic administrative work and supporting analysis of trends, providing insights that can help inform better decisions, and it will have many impacts we have just not thought of yet.

However, can we expect the eventual introduction of a ‘Claims Bot 3000’ that will replace all claims experts? Can the complex process of a specialty insurance claim be done automatically with no human intervention?

Of course, we should welcome AI and use it responsibly, but the fact is that the answer to these questions is ‘no’.  Like the tech revolutions we saw in the eighties and nineties, it might change the way in which we work and how we all execute our roles, but it will not change our need to be present in the process.

It will also not change one of the core foundations of our role: relationships. When a client needs to make a claim, it goes without saying that their business is going through a period of acute stress. Whether it is a cyber breach, a liability claim or anything in between, clients need a provider who is their partner throughout the entire claims process, able to drive and manage a claim through deep experience and able to resolve any issues and reach a successful outcome.

Moreover, clients need a provider who always looks for a reason to pay a claim, not a reason to deny it. This is at the heart of what Robert Kiln believed when he founded Kiln, and very much continues to be our ethos at TMK today.

Indeed, this sensibility is the foundation of what we do. Our focus on enabling our incredible team to go out and make a positive difference, seeing people face-to-face and building lasting, trustworthy relationships means everything to us. 

The role of technology in this instance is not to automate everything, but to act as a tool that provides teams with the ability to focus more attention on what matters most, such as supporting clients, finding solutions and helping them get back up and running following a loss. And certainly, AI will play a role, for example helping to identify deep trends in datasets that deliver better insights and therefore lead to better results for future claims.

And TMK being part of Lloyd’s which has evolved through many technological advances over the last few hundred years, and even with the more profound recent tech changes - including big data, social media and a revolution in communication - the importance and focus on expertise, innovation and client relationships has not changed.  New technology certainly helps accelerate and automate administrative tasks, providing new and better data analysis and equipping experts with high quality insights of historic trends to take into meetings with clients. But technology will never replace the need for those meetings and the lasting relationships that they build.  Likewise, it will not create those same moments where through working together and problem solving, a smart solution can be found. Therefore, we believe clients’ and brokers’ need for a human face remains, and building great relationships is more important than ever.

For me, I believe we need more expertise and talent than ever to get the most from this increasingly nuanced and complex world, and although tech will modernise the claims’ function, top class people doing great things will be more important than ever.