Argo: AI capabilities ‘outpacing industry’s ability to absorb it’

Argo Group’s work on developing artificial intelligence (AI) is centred on what may look like a counterintuitive strategy in the race to gain a competitive edge: the reinsurer is deliberately slowing down its AI development.

Kirsten Charlton (pictured), chief global business services and innovation officer at the Bermuda-based global re/insurer, says the firm has been focusing on the more simple automation uses.

“We’ve been focusing on getting that first part right because if you don’t, you’re more at risk when you take bigger leaps into more complex automations”, she tells Intelligent Insurer.

The reinsurer’s data science and analytics team has been looking at sophisticated data entry, pulling information from various loss runs and training AI models about the different runs to increase the accuracy of that data.

“We’re doing text-mining in a sophisticated way, looking at our claims, notes, things that are not structured data, and identifying fraud—looking for those proverbial needles in a haystack. In the past this might have taken an adjuster hours and hours, now it takes the literal press of a button. So those are exciting things, but we are building trust with our users, whoever those users are.”