With new variants of the virus emerging, it may seem a bit premature to anticipate the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, but many organizations are accelerating digital transformation initiatives that will drive business forward in its wake. In the insurance sector, COVID-19 has been a wake-up call for the industry’s many digital laggards. But as the global economy slowly begins to recover and insurers adjust to doing business in a new normal, the ability to identify, adopt and successfully integrate drivers of digital change is critical. Here are six important technology levers that will drive digital transformation in the future.

To reduce costs and maximize business opportunities, automation is an essential tool for insurers across the insurance value chain. Automation coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) in underwriting processes can help assess risks more effectively and reduce the dependency on humans. By building a service architecture that would allow the collected data to be consumed by an algorithm coupled with AI learning modules, insurers can increase underwriting effectiveness, enable automated risk profiling, create user personas and predict buying behaviors in order to “guarantee” an effective sale. AI helps underwriters uncover nondiscrete data points that provide for another layer of unstructured assessment beyond the traditional approach of underwriting risk based on risk class and historical losses.