Japan’s English language daily newspaper The Mainichi said Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co has bought an AI system based on IBM’s Watson, which “can think like a human”.
The insurer plans to use the system to read medical certificates written by doctors and other documents such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names, to calculate insurance payouts.
Computer checks
In addition to determining payment amounts, the system can check customers’ cases against their insurance contracts to find any special coverage clauses – a measure expected to prevent payment oversights.
The Mainichi said the type of payments the AI system is expected to oversee at Fukoku Mutual totalled some 132,000 cases in fiscal 2015.
Around 34 people are expected to be made redundant by the end of March 2017 as the new system is installed, saving the company around 140m yen (£970,000, $1.12m).
Steady adoption
The Mainichi also reported that three other Japanese insurance companies are considering adopting AI systems.
Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. is currently using a Watson system to process payment assessments, but alongside human checks, thus minimising the staff cuts.
Japan Post Insurance Co. is believed to be looking to a Watson AI for the same duties, and is set to start a trial run in March 2017.
Nippon Life Insurance Co. has already begun using an AI system to analyse the best coverage plans for individual customers, based on some 40 million insurance contracts held by its various salespeople. The system’s results are then used as a reference by the sales offices.
