Almost 200 professionals met in Sydney for the sold-out Insurance News Beyond the Buzzwords conference yesterday to hear how technology is reshaping the industry.

The event featured a 2030 road map session examining the pros and cons of AI and decentralised data.

Raindrop CIO Jamie Smith told the audience it is best to treat AI “like labour, like a human”.

“AI is the game-changer but we can't treat it like a technology, like a tool,” he said.

“If you govern it like labour, then it has a manager, it has a method of being reviewed. Boards know how those work – so all of those frameworks are there.”

Mr Smith says insurers do not just “open the door or let hundreds of people come in and start doing their work”, and checks and balances for AI should be no different.

Allianz CIO Joanne Walker says AI can speed processes, give better insights into customer bases, and fully tailor offerings.

But while insurers are busy moving to the cloud, “things might actually end up coming back at some point. Everyone thinks that means we’re going to move into this lovely, cheaper world, and hopefully that might be the case. But there’s also a fairly significant financial risk once we federate out, we remove our assets into the broader ecosystem.

“In banking, there’s actually been a bit of a migration back to data centres. There’s a lot of conversation around maybe keeping your data assets on-premises so you can really have that protected.

“And the cost of the large language model will be kind of using a sledgehammer at the moment. I think there’s going to be more focus on: is the underlying AI model or set-up you’re using commensurate with the process you need to do?”

QBE Ventures global head of emerging technology Alex Taylor says agentic AI has “created substantially more complexity for ourselves”.

He says use of AI to handle claims is “frankly a little bit scary” and everyone involved in a transaction needs to be aware of what is making decisions.

“As much as we’re handed these amazing tools, suddenly we need to dramatically increase our awareness and understanding of our risk of operating.

“Maybe now you don’t need as much of that human in the room, but what you have is a need to understand precisely how the system can make a decision, and whether it’s making the right decision. How do we know that it does that consistently, that it consistently outperforms a human for this task?

“When we can do that, the sky’s the limit for what we can achieve with this technology. But we’re not there yet, we have to be careful ... coming up with methodologies to adapt to being able to acquiesce to change, but at the same time looking at the downside risk.”

The conference was organised with Insurtech Australia and backed by gold partners Endava, Instanda and Entsia.

See more Beyond the Buzzwords coverage in the next Insurance News magazine.