Intelligent Machines - Risks and opportunities for (re)insurance

P&C

Intelligent Machines - Risks and opportunities for (re)insurance

This Technical Newsletter shows how the development of intelligent machines will affect many aspects of our daily lives and behavior and transform the world of insurance and reinsurance.

April 5, 2018

Strong advances in technology, algorithms and infrastructure have accelerated the development of intelligent machines. With the latest technological improvements, they are now becoming a daily reality.

Better sensors, digital infrastructure that support hyperconnectivity, Big Data, strong algorithms enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning features, all these new technologies are leading to the arrival of increasingly powerful and autonomous machines.

An intelligent machine can:

analyse and react to information about its surroundings;
self-manage over a long time with no human intervention;
take decisions.

Bringing new possibilities, intelligent machines will affect people’s behaviour and transform the insurance and reinsurance business in many ways. Besides the topical self-driving cars and drones, intelligent machines will take their place in a wide range of areas such as marine, aviation, mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and healthcare.

Intelligent machines will profoundly alter the insurance and reinsurance risk profiles and business models:

they will create new business opportunities: corporations will increasingly need protection against new exposures and business interruption risks;
they will create new tail risks: a single point of failure can bring an entire global operation to a halt;
they will introduce transformative trends: these will create shifts in insurance business and transform the legal, social, economic and operational environments for insurance.