How Applied Uses AI in Our Products

Like many other companies, we discuss artificial intelligence (AI) often. How can we not? AI is dramatically changing the insurance industry right before our eyes, from streamlining repetitive tasks and improving the customer experience to enhancing risk assessments and decision-making.

As we strategize innovative tech for The Next Generation of the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance, AI is top of mind at Applied. However, it may not be so transparent to our customers. One question we keep getting asked is, “How is Applied implementing AI into your products?”

When Did Applied Start Using AI?

Our AI journey has been underway for years as we’ve been learning alongside our customers through the Applied AI Lab. We significantly expanded our efforts last year after acquiring Planck, the leading insurance-specific AI company, and we're very proud to be the leading investor in AI in our market.

Where and How Does Applied Use AI?

We're investing in tech across every aspect of the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance, which connects sales and marketing, policy management, submissions and underwriting, financial management and servicing. The goal is to infuse the power of AI across each stage of the Digital Roundtrip and impact your business end-to-end. Analysis from firms like Bain and McKinsey suggests that AI will increase revenue by 30% for businesses and decrease E&O exposure by 90%. AI experts also agree that solutions are most valuable when tailored to specific markets, which are known as Vertical AI solutions.

Let's break down how AI is being infused in each stage of the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance to empower our customers to unlock greater value in their businesses, and the specific products using AI now or in the future.

Sales and Marketing

Since consumers' inboxes can become crowded quickly, your content needs to have the right message, be sent to the right audience, and be delivered at the right time. We designed Applied Marketing Automation® to be accessible natively within the management system as a generative AI purpose-built tool. Directly integrated into Applied Epic®, your team can leverage a diverse library of industry-specific curated content to help create timely, effective marketing campaigns.

When your team wants to track campaign performance, native reporting displays which content and messages your audience engages with the most. This helps you easily adjust your campaigns to be more effective rather than sifting through multiple data sets and spending more time analyzing than taking action.

Financial Management

Reconciling financial transactions doesn't need to consume as much time and resources as it does. Applied Recon™, launching this fall, will change the way you approach statement reconciliation for direct bill commissions and agency bill carrier payables. Once a statement is uploaded in any format, AI will extract key information like dates, policy or plan numbers, premiums, and commissions, and present them as structured financial data for recording and reconciliation. This AI-powered accounting automation solution covers more than 90% of certified P&C and Benefits carriers and makes a time-consuming task more straightforward, efficient and faster.

Submissions and Underwriting

At Applied, our ownership of Ivans uniquely positions us to address the pressing needs of agencies and carriers alike, regardless of size. Our integrated technologies facilitate deeper collaboration throughout the independent insurance distribution channel, enhancing visibility into quotes, submissions, and servicing requests. We have a vision to accelerate the transition to digital risk flows and the opportunity to provide more “underwriting-ready submissions,” with the aim of shortening the mid-market submission/evaluation process from weeks to days. We are delivering new innovation that will accelerate our agency capability to create a single, connected commercial lines workflow – from risk data capture and collaboration to submission – natively within Applied Epic.

We have a vision to empower agencies and carriers to work together more effectively with our 'single pane of glass' experiences, minimizing underwriting and servicing friction, and drastically reducing the time spent on exchanging risk evaluations, policy data, and other essential documents. This results in quicker policy decisions, lower costs and enhanced service delivery.

Servicing

Keeping track of email activities involved while servicing can be overwhelming, and you need an efficient way to stay on top of your communications while effectively conveying your expertise and actions. Manually entering notes for email Activities in Applied Epic was once time-consuming, but not with our new Email Summarization capability. The AI in this feature allows you to attach an email in Applied Epic, click a button, and summarize it into an Activity note. You have control over which emails are summarized and can edit the copy to your liking. Consider how quickly your team can act on tasks with readily available account data and policy documents.

Policy Management

Identifying the required coverages for a commercial prospect, cross-sell and upsell opportunities and performing risk research can be challenging. You want to build a profile that ensures the client is getting the coverage their business needs based on their risks and drive profitable premium growth, but that requires plenty of manual research and time. It requires a detailed understanding of customer risks.

Coming soon to Applied Epic, Applied Book Builder™ uses AI to enrich commercial risk profiles from thousands of public sources, saving you hours of research. This AI-powered risk intelligence application enables book of business growth throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It allows you to build more complete and accurate risk profiles and identify a business's coverage needs, all within the same system you use to manage day-to-day client activity. Accessing the AI-driven, actionable insights on your book of business on one system saves you from manually analyzing data and hopping back and forth between systems.

Our AI-Powered Product Vision

AI is taking the insurance industry into an exhilarating technological revolution, and we're excited to be at the forefront. Our vision is to embed intelligent automation amplified by AI throughout the insurance lifecycle, empowering agencies to unlock next-generation value to maximize staff productivity, amplify book of business growth, optimize insurer partnerships, and improve insured satisfaction. Check out these resources for more information on how Applied is using AI in our tech.