TAL Australia “very early” in AI journey

TAL Australia is still in the early days of AI adoption and is said to be “investigating slowly” regarding use cases ideal for its company.

The insurer has also said it will first experiment with AI usage amongst employee operations before shifting focus to customers.

The life insurance company’s strategy planning manager Katie Holroyd said it’s “a lot harder to move faster” in the AI space.

“We've been investigating slowly. We've done the self-service assessment with Genesys which just finished, which has helped identify a number of user cases. We were already working on a number already.

“We have been using speech analytics and we've used that quite extensively to help us with our QA identification.

“We're still in the process of moving from our legacy system to Genesys cloud, we’re halfway there.

“Hopefully the end of this month we'll be doing agent assist notes summaries, to have a look at improvements on the handling times but also better engagement for our employees,” Holroyd said.

“Then some of the other stuff that the self-assessment identified was ID and verify, so we can make sure we understand who the people are, and surface their attempts and be able to process those.

Holroyd added that TAL Australia has also gone “through the purchase of a number of banks life insurance companies.”

Speaking at a recent Genesys Xperience Sydney Holroyd told the audience this means rebranding customers from Westpac Life Insurance Services, which it acquired in 2021, over to TAL Australia.

“It's one of the challenges in our industry, lots of complex systems behind and trying to make it easy for people to land at the right place.”

Holroyd said "that this is really where our focus is for the next little while".

During the discussion,  Holroyd also said the company has an AI policy in the works at the moment “and because it's early days, it's educating the rest of the business about what is AI and the risks”.

“It's controlled by the data analytics committee. They approve our AI usage, so looking forward to that being faster and more open to trialling new things.”

The company has already said earlier this year it's seeking opportunities to scale out its search pilot capabilities following improvements found in its ‘claims assist knowledge search’ trial, in partnership with Microsoft.