Back in 1993, my class visited a farm where we were shown a tech-driven gadget that would monitor the weight of battery hens, and based on that, adjust the amount of feed dispensed automatically to the peckish critters. “It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to control the amount of food they get,” the farmer bragged to us proudly.

This week, more than 30 years later, two press release headlines caught my eye. One shouts that Aventum, parent company to multiple high-quality MGAs, “confirms Development of AI Underwriting Assistant.” In the other, Hiscox (a former employer of mine) invoked Google to spice up their announcement that their “generative AI-enhanced lead underwriting model enabled by Google Cloud goes live.”

These are really exciting developments. Whether we call it machine learning or generative AI, the powerful and predictive analysis which can be carried out by computers in support of underwriters is truly invaluable. I do wonder why it’s headline material now, instead of when it all started, but at least it’s finally happening.

The proposed Aventum tool will “triage submissions and identify if they are within appetite.” Imagine a system-to-system chatbot that asks scoping questions at lightning speed, which are answered by the data in the submission email. It’s an extremely sensible use of tech to remove a mundane task. The approach is already widely adopted.

The Hiscox solution is different. The company says it “now has the ability to remove manual elements of the underwriting process.” But it states sensible caveats. The system, which incorporates Google’s Gemini large language model and its own HAILO (that’s ‘Hiscox AI Laboratories’) tool, will be used only for straightforward sabotage and terrorism renewal quotes.

It’s not clear to me how generative AI is used, probably when the system “generates an email for the broker with pricing and other data already completed, ready for underwriter review.” But it certainly adds sex appeal to the headline. Even without it, the innovation shows great promise.

I don’t know how the farmer got on weighing his chickens, but I am delighted that – 30 years later – our commercial insurance market is finally embracing these tried and tested technologies. We have deployed machine learning and AI in Quotech platforms since the first prototype, and will continue to find new ways to use these technologies to remove pain points for clients. We just haven’t found time for a press release.