As one of our main partners, UiPath has been a well-seen and much appreciated insurtech for years now. They have been sharing their vision and use cases, like with Generali at DIA Amsterdam 2022. In week before DIA Munich 2022 we have the pleasure of talking to Elaine Mannix, Global Insurance Lead at UiPath.  

For those people who are new to DIA, who is UiPath? 

UiPath offers an end-to-end enterprise platform for automation, combining an intelligent automation solution with a full suite of intelligent capabilities that improve insurance operations’ agility, speed in response time, and get customer-facing digital capabilities up and running faster. It is agnostic and can be used throughout the insurance value chain.  

Robots still sounds a bit scary, what makes you so passionate about intelligent automation? 

We see there is a great opportunity when combining bots with humans. In short: it is possible to achieve more with less if we augment humans with AI and Intelligent Automation. 

With mounting pressure on insurance companies to deliver strategic goals around growth, improved customer and employee experience, efficiency and compliance not to mention the evolving requirements and risk around ESG, building a resilient organsization and workforce to deliver these goals is top of mind. 

We have now seen RPA use cases successfully delivered across the full value chain in insurance with areas such as Underwriting, Actuarial services and risk, compliance and audit quicker to uptake than expected. They see the value of accuracy and the full audit trail from Robots!   

And what does this mean for the insurance industry? 

We have seen RPA chip away at making processes across the value chain more efficient, but it hasn’t normally led to significant change in the process or organisation. Let’s explore why.  

Transforming customer journeys end-to-end means dealing with fragmented processes, departments, functions and systems. In insurance we traditionally created long linear ‘conveyor belt’ processes as we shuffled paper from team to team, front, middle and backoffice, with growing oversight functions that are checking what everyone is doing.  

This mindset and set up is not going to lead to transformation. The key is to approach Insurance is a data business, and many tasks and processes can be done simultaneously with enabling technology. Intelligent business rules can be added to new, dynamic data to create better products and services. There is no silver bullet in Insurance, yet we believe that a convergence of technology will take Insurance to the next level. 

Sounds like you saw many examples. Can you share some successes and learnings? 

Success is achieved by doing top down (end to end) automation, including all departments and processes where bottom-up or citizen-led automation is supporting this transition.   

This agile, cost-effective technology is allowing (re)insurers to understand their requirements as they change and adopt a test and learn culture. Top-down end to end automation drives a focus on improving customer experiences and joining up fragmented teams, processes and systems for a 360-customer view to personalize service.  Creating this capability in teams with ‘Super Users’ can harness the value and opportunities of local experts, coupled with a bottom up, citizen-led program to automate their own tasks. Democratising this capability to create an army of change agents 

The biggest challenge is around change management. The technology has been proven, there are so many use cases and people are understanding how and where AI can help. Six years ago, we were scratching our heads about RPA, what it is, how will it help etcetera. Two years ago, we were doing that with AI. Now we can see the value of building ML models to make our processes more intelligent. Building, testing, publishing and keeping audit trails on models has become easier, with less or no need for the scarce data science skills. It means companies need to invest in bringing people on the journey, making sure they see the opportunity and act on it.  

So what does the future hold when it comes to RPA? 

In our view, all insurance companies will have a digital workforce supporting core customer journeys 24/7 with a tailored experience. The hand-offs between humans and AI will be seamless. New channels, data, products and services will be integrated more easily with training for both humans and digital assistants being the norm. 

In terms of challenges, we see people and tech challenges. On the people side of automation, it will be about attracting and retaining talent without a better employee experience. On the tech side, we see that insurance companies are slow to adopt Cloud, which is mission critical to capitalize on AI models and document understanding (OCR). 

Having a strategic vision for your future augmented workforce is and will be key. Looking to the potential of intelligent automation and AI in every strategic program and project you do and target at least 15% of it is automated to stay ahead. Deal with the fear factor head on, provide the training and transition to new roles. 

Insurtech plays a vital role in the future of insurance as partnering with specialty solutions or capability will drive a competitive edge as insurance companies strive to scoop up the opportunities created in a changing world. Insurance companies must ask themselves whether they are building a resilient organisation and workforce with the right tech and skills to deliver on-going change instead of discreet projects with a start and end date.  

Who is UiPath? 

UiPath has a vision to deliver the Fully Automated Enterprise™, one where companies use automation to unlock their greatest potential. UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining the leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to rapidly scale digital business operations.  

UiPath is a global software company that makes robotic process automation (RPA) software. It was founded in Bucharest, Romania, by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă. Its headquarters are in New York City. The company’s software monitors user activity to automate repetitive front and back-office tasks, including those performed using other business software such as customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.  

In December 2020, the company filed confidentially for an initial public offering and became public on April 21, 2021.