Allstate’s cloud-first approach to digital transformation pays off

When a human representative calls the customer, they are fully informed and ready to move to next stages. “We put people in the flow when it matters most,” says Jeevanjee, noting this important change in the process has vastly improved customer satisfaction.

Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP and analyst at Gartner, says he is seeing similar generative AI pilots being undertaken at financial services and other insurance companies, as well as technology, media, and entertainment organizations.

According to Chandrasekaran, insurance companies have been leading the way to implement technologies such as speech to text and transcription to speed up claims processing and customers satisfaction, and use of generative AI, which, although presently low in the insurance industry, is projected to grow significantly in the next 12 months, is just the latest stab at achieving these outcomes.

“These use cases have been around in the insurance sector actually for a while now,” he says. “Where language models can add value essentially is in terms of better cognition, because they’re able to craft responses” and bring in more information to re-create events in an effort to more accurately handle claims. “As models evolve in the future to become fully multi-modal, they [will be] able to traverse different types of data.”

One of the four largest automobile and home insurers in the US, Allstate manages roughly 190 million policies protecting cars, homes, motorcycles, health, disability, lives, personal devices, and identities, according to a company spokesperson.

The organization employs roughly 54,500, and supports 10,100 exclusive Allstate agents and 51,900 independent agents. About 8,000 employees are dedicated to IT throughout the company and roughly 1,000 of these employees report directly to Jeevanjee.

The CIO’s biggest challenge in its cloud-native approach from the start is “changing the culture to become a digital company,” Jeevanjee says, noting that getting the commitment from the entire C-suite to embrace the plan has made his job far easier. “What we’ve done is look at all of our processes and make them digital ready.”