Amelia Lowe, Vice President of Operations at SquareTrade, on the potential for AI to revolutionise InsurTech
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We have all witnessed the growth of AI in the past year. It’s quickly becoming an innate part of how we work. In the UK alone, the number of AI registered companies has increased by over 600% in under a decade. While the size of the AI market is expected to grow to over £800 billion by 2035. AI holds the power to radically reshape the way we live, learn, and conduct business. It can unlock possibilities we once only imagined. In the past two years, we’ve witnessed this transformational potential come to life. It’s driving innovation and redefining industries at an unprecedented pace.
We stand on the brink of a new era. AI is poised to become an integral force that not only enhances our daily lives but also paves the way for a more effective way of doing business and connecting with customers. AI holds the key to supercharging the customer experience, by creating seamless, intelligent customer journeys. So how do we do it?
In today’s highly competitive world, great customer service is essential. Customers do not want to feel like just another number. They want their individual needs to be recognised and addressed with personalised responses.
At SquareTrade, we aim to engage with our customers in ways that feel authentic and personal, even when they are engaging with AI. Our objective is to deliver a level of personalised interaction that was once thought of as unattainable with automated systems. Furthermore, ensuring every customer feels appreciated and understood in each exchange.
Enhancing customer experiences with AI for seamless, intelligent journeys
At the core of any customer relationship is the confidence that issues will be resolved quickly and effectively. Your team, and the people behind your company, play a pivotal role in delivering that trust across all customer touchpoints.
When integrating AI into a business, it is essential to align the technology with the company’s core objectives. For us, the focus has been on driving innovation and streamlining processes while ensuring customer service remains uncompromised. Our goal is to ensure, no matter how AI is implemented, the customer experience feels personal and authentic. Even with automated systems, we want to provide a level of personalised interaction that was once unimaginable. We see AI as an extension of our team. In light of that we apply the same values and principles to those we apply to our team, which focus on trust, transparency and respect.
Have you met Sally?
We now live in a world where AI tools and customer experience must work in harmony. According to Statista, 73% of consumers believe AI can enhance customer experience, with 80% reporting positive interactions with AI so far. Clearly, AI has reached a point where customers can appreciate its benefits during their times of need. It can seamlessly recognise and addresses issues productively.
When businesses explore integrating AI solutions, it’s crucial to align them with their unique standards, customer service approach, and company culture. No two AI solutions are alike. For us, it was vital that any AI implementation seamlessly complemented our existing operations. A key example of how we’ve achieved this is through the introduction of Sally, our AI chatbot. Sally provides one of the quickest and most efficient ways for customers to engage with us when visiting our website. This enhances the user experience while staying true to our service values.
We are already witnessing the benefits of introducing Sally. She consistently achieves high success rates in resolving customer incidents autonomously. By deploying her in a strategic and targeted manner, we can reserve human interactions for more complex queries and claims.
AI Training for Operational Excellence
AI’s potential goes beyond customer interactions. It is increasingly being leveraged for training and education within organisations. In an industry like insurance, where no two claims are the same, InsurTech companies need training systems that prepare team members to adapt to a wide variety of scenarios.
Given that individuals learn in diverse ways and at varying speeds, the ability to create personalised learning experiences is immensely valuable. We see AI training tools as the equivalent of providing each employee with a personal tutor. Moreover, one that can adapt to their unique strengths, challenges, and learning styles.
And the learning doesn’t stop when the training does. AI-powered platforms can now continuously assess performance in real-time. If an employee is struggling in a particular area, the AI can automatically adjust the learning program to address those needs. This ensures ongoing growth and development tailored to each individual.
Fraud Detection
AI is poised to revolutionise fraud detection and prevention. It is becoming an invaluable asset to the teams that monitor for suspicious activity. In the insurance industry, AI can be deployed at multiple levels to enhance fraud detection. For example, through intelligent automation that swiftly analyses large datasets and flags potentially fraudulent claims for further investigation. This can save valuable time and resources.
AI can also enable the creation of predictive models that forecast fraud based on historical data and emerging trends. This helps insurance players to stay one step ahead of evolving threats. These models improve risk assessment accuracy by reducing false positives and allowing us to focus more effectively on genuine risks.
Looking ahead, the potential for AI in fraud detection is immense. AI is breaking new ground in areas where traditional rule-based systems fall short. Its ability to process vast amounts of data in real time, identify patterns and anomalies that would be nearly impossible to detect manually, makes it a game-changer in tackling complex problems.
Embracing AI Advancements
AI has the potential to revolutionise countless industries, but its impact is particularly profound in InsurTech. Given the critical role insurance plays in people’s lives, the opportunities for innovation and improvement are vast.
As an industry, it’s essential we recognise AI’s ability to transform customer experiences. As early adopters, we have witnessed its potential firsthand. We will continue to leverage these advancements to enhance personalised and automated processes. We can bridge language barriers, and create new methods of interaction.
However, our focus must always be on finding the right balance. Identifying where these solutions can deliver the greatest impact in serving customer needs quickly and effectively. Moreover, also ensuring that we retain the opportunity for human connection whenever it is needed. As well as ensuring compliance and security are a core part of how we think about implementing solutions to enhance business operations.
We caught up with Shachi Rai Gupta from ORO Labs to discuss the importance of orchestration in procurement.
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Simplifying procurement in smart ways is the ultimate goal for ORO Labs. Utilising the best of AI, ORO Labs aims to implement procurement orchestration across sectors, creating an experience that is simultaneously automated, augmented, and humanised.
Shachi Rai Gupta is VP Strategy at ORO Labs, with a wealth of transformation and technology experience behind her. Rai Gupta’s sharp eye on procurement has allowed her to witness the rise and fall of various trends, and understand what the sector needs as it – along with technology – evolves.
We caught up with Rai Gupta at the DPW NYC Summit back in June, a special North American version of the event. Procurement trends, especially AI and orchestration, were very much the theme of the day, prompting lively conversations amongst some of the world’s most influential procurement leaders.
Procurement as a net positive experience generator
For Rai Gupta, the trends right now are guided by the fact that procurement has more of a strategic and evolved role than ever, giving the function the opportunity to have a great impact on the enterprise bottom-line and the environment and community at large
“Procurement is morphing into a function where one of its biggest responsibilities is to be a net positive experience generator,” she explains.
“Procurement really is a service function for the whole business stakeholders. We, as procurement professionals, need to see things through the lens of the business. This includes what issues the business is trying to solve, and meeting the business where it’s at for good collaboration.
“It’s also important to make this experience as easy as possible, rather than cumbersome and time intensive. That needs to be catered and customised to the individual business segments.”
Prioritising the planet
Another area Rai Gupta is seeing talked about a lot is sustainability. This topic has, for some, been sidelined a little in favour of advanced technology. But it’s just as important as it’s always been, and it’s vital to keep the discussion alive – especially in procurement.
“More and more, companies are realising the impact they’re having on the environment,” Rai Gupta explains. “It’s an increasing priority on all our agendas. The technology is still nascent in that space, in the sense that there aren’t good ways to do benchmarking or tracking. That’s going to be an interesting space to watch out for.”
The next generation
Another hot topic of the DPW NYC Summit was the talent shortage. We at CPOstrategy discuss this topic a lot with procurement professionals, and there’s no one answer for fixing the issue.
“There’s a dearth of good digital talent,” Rai Gupta states. “The skillset you need today in procurement is very different from what we’ve had before. To be able to leverage that, to really make use of the procurement teams you have and the operational model you want, it’s a different challenge. The structure of your team is more important than ever.
“While that shortage is there, when you do have the right people in place in procurement, that’s where the department shines,” Rai Gupta adds. “That’s where procurement becomes a group of trusted advisors for the business, providing proactive opportunities. We wear a lot of hats in procurement, and we’re stepping up to a new level of evolution.”
Advanced tech for good
And, of course, AI and orchestration are terms on everyone’s lips right now – procurement included. AI is, in Rai Gupta’s words, “a solver”. Many of the blockages and challenges procurement is experiencing as it evolves can be solved, or at least aided, by AI and orchestration. “There’s so much tech out there,” Rai Gupta states. “AI is one such possibility. Every segment of procurement comes with its own risks and requires its own expertise and tool sets.
“To manage that whole ecosystem is where that orchestration comes in. There’s a real beauty in this because it’s collaborative. It makes the whole bigger than its parts.”
We chatted with Johan-Peter Teppala from Sievo about why procurement needs to use technology wisely.
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When CPOstrategy attended the DPW NYC Summit back in June, one of the buzzwords of the day was trends. Trends in procurement, trends in technology, and how to combine the two. The event was filled with productive discussions around how procurement can benefit from data and advanced technology. This led to a hopeful vibe throughout the day, despite and because of acknowledgements of procurement’s shortfalls.
We caught up with Johan-Peter Teppala, Chief Customer Officer of Sievo, at the NYC conference. For Teppala, that hopefulness is something he took away from the event. “It is great to see so many companies out there with keen interest in adopting new securities and technologies,” he says. “Procurement has increasing demand to do more with less, which explains also the need for technology to drive efficiency and to deliver more. I think it’s just inertia that’s slowing us down.”
However, advanced technology is helping shift the inertia that’s so prevalent across procurement. “Developments in GenAI have been exceptionally fast, especially recently,” Teppala adds. “With an increasing amount of practical Gen AI use cases, this has become a topic that touches each and everyone in procurement. At Sievo, we are dedicating R&D budgets to AI innovations. We have quickly been able to ramp up many practical use cases for our clients to deliver business value in this area.”
Using data and technology wisely
Teppala continues: “Sievo strives to withhold our position as the leading Procurement Analytics partner for large enterprises. We are driven by the goal to close the data-to-action gap. We believe analytics alone has zero value, it’s the actions that we take that drive the value.” This was a topic that was repeated several times during the DPW NYC Summit.
“As a result, SIevo’s goal is to ensure our customers can use their time most efficiently. We help them make business-impacting decisions and best use their expertise, whilst Sievo automatically surfaces insights that they can take action on. First and foremost, our work is about carving out insights. And once you have those insights, how do you automate those actions to create opportunities? That’s definitely one thing we’re keen to solve.”
Sievo is also focusing its attention on gen AI – how it can be adopted and what the use cases are. “AI for data cleansing has been around for a while,” says Teppala. “Right now, Gen AI is getting really good traction from a technology point of view. It’s not just insights, but adopting AI into chat interfaces, and reaping the benefits with implementable actions. It’s amazing.”
The changing talent landscape
The increased adoption of AI is going to also change the talent landscape within procurement. Another heavily-discussed topic during DPW NYC was the talent shortage and how it has the potential to slow procurement down. However, advanced technology may be the thing that accelerates it once again.
“The talent you need is changing,” says Teppala. “The procurement mandate has widened beyond delivering cost savings. Now, it’s also about driving sustainability initiatives, emission reductions, increasing diverse spending, and preventing supply chain risks. Procurement has to be creative and resource-effective for reaching ideal outcomes. This is a big challenge but also a big opportunity and also impacts the talent needed in procurement.
“You don’t necessarily need to hire superstars who know everything. It’s about teamwork. Building a procurement team out of people who possess all these modern talents, who can support each other. I can’t know whether this is going to solve the talent shortage, but at least we’re shifting towards a different kind of talent as capabilities change.
Teppala concludes: “We need to be thinking more about what kind of team we actually want to build – not just what kind of really good, talented individual we can find.”
Sage, the leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), has announced an expansion…
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Sage, the leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), has announced an expansion of its partnership with a leading neobank. What’s more, Stripe offers a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, to help improve cashflow management and payment processing for SMBs. The partnership is key to helping businesses to move money easier and faster
Sage partners with neobank Stripe
Stripe is trusted by millions of businesses around the world, ranging from startups to enterprises. The partnership with Stripe provides Sage customers with more options to pay and get paid quickly. Additionally, leveraging Stripe’s financial infrastructure, Sage will offer its customers a trusted solution to help ease cashflow and simplify financial processes. From streamlined checkout and payment processing, to Tap to Pay contactless payments, and auto-reconciling bank transfers.
Also, in partnership with Stripe, Sage intends to expand its payments ecosystem. Therefore, ensuring that a growing number of its customers have access to services that will help them to manage their cashflow.
“This partnership signifies a shared vision between Sage and Stripe. To transform how SMBs pay and get paid, helping our customers to simplify cashflow management,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Chief Product Officer, Sage. “Furthermore, we are committed to harnessing the power of technology to drive innovation, enhance efficiency, and pave the way for growth.”
Addressing cashflow problems
Supporting customers globally, Stripe’s integration into Sage is currently available in the UK through Sage Accounting, Sage 50 and Sage 200. Also, Stripe is fully integrated into Sage Network, enabling customers to easily plug into the broader Sage ecosystem. Moreover, they can choose additional applications and features such as Sage Connect, automating AR and AP processes to help manage their cashflow and payments.
The expansion of the partnership will see customers benefits including:
Streamlined checkout and payment processing: SMBs with cash trapped in outstanding invoices can make it easier for customers to review their accounts. They can pay with Sage Connect’s customer account portal and Stripe Checkout.
Multiple payment methods: Accept payments from customers through different methods including digital wallets, cards and bank transfers. Additionally, Stripe uses machine learning to surface the most relevant payment methods for customers depending on their location.
Unified payments experience: Collect payments online and in person through Tap-to-Pay, for seamless, in-person, contactless payments No terminal hardware required.
A safe and secure payment experience: Leveraging Stripe’s advanced security protocols and compliance with global financial regulations. Customers can be assured transactions are protected against fraud and data breaches. Providing peace of mind for both businesses and their clients.
Auto-reconciling bank transfers: Saving time with automatic reconciliation. Finally, bank transfers enable customers to pay invoices via bank transfer, streamlining the payment and reconciliation process.
“Sage understands the importance of innovating for its customers. We’re thrilled to be part of its journey,” said Eileen O’Mara, Chief Revenue Officer at Stripe. “Stripe is building a suite of software-defined financial services. Ultimately, we can enable leading platforms like Sage to provide integrated features that make their customers’ lives easier.”
Lastly, this partnership adds to the broad range of payments and banking partners within Sage’s ecosystem.
We look into the supply chain production process of Easter Eggs and the journey to their final destinations in supermarkets
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Chocolate is arguably the world’s most popular sweet treat. Depending on who you ask, of course.
After, perhaps Christmas, it is the most common time for people to indulge in chocolate if they don’t do so anyway throughout the year.
And synonymous with Easter are the eggs themselves which are loved by children and adults alike all over the world.
The journey to Easter Eggs
The supply chain process is split into eight stages of production: cultivating, harvesting, splitting, fermentation, drying, winnowing, roasting and grinding. Following production, the supply chain process is extended further with logistics which is the final step to providing customers with their favourite seasonal sweet treat.
The journey actually begins with cocoa tree plantations being established which is done by scattering young cocoa trees amongst new shade trees or by planting the cocoa trees between established trees. These are planted in humid tropical climates, with temperatures between 21 and 23 degrees Celsius. This is consistent rainfall periods and a short dry season because these conditions provide good quality cocoa.
Each tree produces 20-30 cocoa pods a year which grows straight from the tree’s trunk and main branches. With this tree also yielding fruit, the crop is carefully pruned, and as a result, it is easier to harvest the cocoa pods. The next step is the labour-intensive task of harvesting the crop.
The harvest is a whole community affair on small West African farms. Large knives are then used to detach the pods from the trees and placed in large baskets on workers’ heads. The pods are then manually split open to remove the beans so they are ready for the two-step curing process. Each pod consists of between 20-40 purple cocoa beans.
The curing process consists of fermenting and drying the beans to develop the chocolate flavour. There are several fermentation methods but the most traditional is the heap method. This requires placing mounds of wet cocoa beans in between layers of banana leaves on the ground for between five to six days. Following this, the drying stage begins. This involves the wet bunch of beans being spread out in the sun or using a more advanced method of special dying equipment.
From plant to factory
Often, a lot of large chocolate brands then buy the cocoa through intermediaries. The beans are then packed into sacks ready to be exported to the brands processing facilities in other locations globally.
After arrival, the beans are cleaned and quality inspected before the winnowing stage takes place. The dried beans are cracked to separate the shell from the nib which is where the small chunks are used to produce chocolate. Afterwards, the roasting phase begins in which the nibs are baked at high temperatures reaching 120 degrees Celsius in special ovens. This is where the colour and flavour is acquired.
Subsequently, the next stage is grinding which creates the basis of all chocolate products. The roasted nibs are grounded in stone mills until a thick liquid chocolate consistency is achieved.
Chocolate to egg
The final step is creating the chocolate egg masterpiece by using highly efficient computer-operated technology which has been used since the mid-20th century. The molten chocolate is placed in heated egg molds which are rotated so there is an even thickness. Following this, the eggs are left to cool and then removed from the molds. Once cooled, the eggs are wrapped in coloured foil and packaged into individual boxes before being sent out for retail. The transportation and exportation throughout the various supply chain stages is vital being a seasonal product. This means they are heavily relied upon for their timings to deliver to large supermarkets and independent stores.
Interface Magazine talks to Vladimir Arshinov, IT Director at steel producer SIJ Group regarding the company’s massive digital transformation
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Going into 2017, SIJ Group (Slovenian Steel Group) – Slovenia’s biggest steel producer and one of the largest manufacturers of stainless and special steels in Europe had typical IT structure with semi-independent IT departments on each plant. And like many modern enterprises, SIJ was at work drafting a strategy to transform its operations, systems and processes into a more unified structure in a bid to improve productivity, safety and the all-important bottom line.
Vladimir Arshinov is SIJ’s IT
Director and his initial focus in 2017 was trained on the digital
transformation of SIJ’s IT department to a more transparent organization with a
clear workflow. Previously, IT was a department of innovation with each individual
plant having its own independent function, none of which connected with each
other, often across varying geographies. “This meant that lots of efforts were wasted
solving the same issues with different solutions,” Arshinov reveals.
At the end of 2017, SIJ
established a Project Management Office. PMBOK was selected as a master
methodology and the Head of PMO received PMP certification and developed
internal regulation documents, rules and methodology. After finalizing the
initial establishment phase, hiring project managers and the organization of
the operational work, SIJ came to the conclusion that to raise the scope and
complexity of the projects program, they needed a tool. The MS Project
Management Server was duly selected and implemented allowing SIJ to simplify
observation of the progress of projects and control, while ultimately reducing
duration. Project team meetings were almost eliminated, and the distribution,
control and execution of project tasks, were assigned to the project team
members who managed and controlled projects including budget consumption. Each
project member would then be measured for effectiveness.
Turning the IT department
into a leaner function was a massive first step for SIJ as it needed a firm
foundation upon which all future innovation could sit. And so, the next step in
SIJ’s internal IT transformation was aimed at the most sensitive and critical
area: software development. As with many metallurgical companies SIJ had a bulk
of different IT systems, which were supplied or developed in the past and had
to be either permanently supported, or, due to the business requirements,
changed. One concern with the legacy system was the reliance on locally based
productive software developer engineers developing new solutions and then,
after, supporting them, resulting in a massive drop in development speed, as
development and the subsequent support increased. This situation was causing
overloading, burnout and frustration, triggering a desire to change something;
sometimes resulting in employer change. However, SIJ IT considers people as its
major asset and were determined to break the vicious circle of “one system
– one person – forever”.
“What we did from an organizational point of view was to unify all geographically distributed developers from 4 different companies into the several virtual groups in each department,” Arshinov explains. “Each group has a Team Leader role, who assigns tasks to the group members and controls the execution of each individual task.”
Development
at SIJ is now organised according to an agile approach using scrum boards and
Microsoft Project Server to control all the time sheets of the people involved
in the projects, plus their schedules and budgets. SIJ uses
Microsoft Azure DevOps Server for unified storage of inter-company source code
and Change Request Scrum board monitoring and control. Process and technical
solutions now allow SIJ to involve external software development partners into
the development process while controlling their activities, deliverables and
costs. Developers can now use the Azure DevOps Server
with the scrum board and are now able to register change requests in their
system by themselves, where they see the progress of all individual change
requests coming through the process with the integration of the IT Director
informing the exchange and updating the status of the task development.
In October 2019 SIJ revamped
and migrated its Corporate Business Intelligence system to a new MicroStategy
platform. The project took six months and provided SIJ with an extensive
corporate Business Intelligence system with more than 180 different dashboards
covering production, finance, sales, procurement, HR, Legal and investment
functional areas. The overwhelming majority of the data now uploads
automatically and the business intelligence tool has
created a unified reporting system across the group utilizing the same source
of data in order to integrate it. “There was huge involvement of the business
customers with Oracle BI and this year, we moved to this new platform,”
Arshinov explains. “The front end of the system was changed (from Oracle BI) to
MicroStrategy for usability and a unified interface. Now, SIJ has a system that
looks the same no matter the device it’s accessed from. This project allows us
to organize and develop the team that tests the trial usage and develops the
processes of the PMO (Project Management Office) inside the IT function.”
The BI System contains the
entire spectrum of corporate data and allows SIJ to move quickly and
transparently when taking a management decision, while reducing the number of
mistakes, misunderstandings and time-consuming meetings.
The next system to be unified across the group was the Salesforce CRM system, which is now fully integrated. Then, an Oracle supplier portal followed, which opened the possibility of organizing tenders, thus massively simplifying the purchasing process. Oracle Innovation Management is another successful implementation, which, although a relatively small project, has had a big influence on the business transformation and innovation through increased flexibility. “It is also used to motivate people to suggest improvements and new innovative ideas,” he says.
So,
what have been the major successes, according to Arshinov, following the
ongoing digital transformation at SIJ? “The main difference between now and
then was that each individual company was living alone, and I see now that the
IT function in this case is unifying the people and allowing them to speak in a
single language. It doesn’t matter if it’s a steel center or a big plant,” he
explains. Costs have been dramatically reduced too, outsourcing being a prime
example. In 2016, SIJ was spending more than 70%
annual budget for operational external services.
For 2020, that part of budget reduced to 40%. Meanwhile, the capital investments part of the
budget has grown from 4% in 2016 to 56% in 2020.
The
implementation of a Supply Chain Planning system (from Quintiq) incorporating
the Oracle Business Suite, has improved the delivery, safety and performance of
SIJ’s plants. “We improved Delivery Performance OTIFF (on time and in full) of
a stainless steel plant by 12.8% in six months,” he enthuses. “And we shortened
the production cycle by 15,4% from ordering to shipping, which is a brilliant
result within six months of going live.”
In
SIJ Matal Ravne has replaced the melt shop technology system and entire plant
manufacturing execution system to replace the obsolete legacy system – which
had zero planning functionality – with PSI Metals. “First of all, we’re increasing the level of understanding
and the knowledge of the internal IT team, while dramatically decreasing
project cost by involving internal specialists into the supplier team. That
allows us to save several hundred thousand Euros of project budget and it’s a
win-win situation for the supplier as well. First of all, the supplier is
receiving our team, which knows the production and the limitations and has
extensive inside knowledge. At the end of the day, the commercial value, in
this case, is the cheaper price. Cheaper than anybody else is able to receive.”
Another
and no less important project for Sij Metal Ravne is the joint development work
with Comtrade Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). Laboratories in
metallurgy companies are complicated and highly demanding environments with
unique processes required for quality control of all products and this solution
covers and improves core laboratory processes and will be highly integrated
with the PSI manufacturing execution system from one side and Oracle ERP on the
other.
Through this massive digital transformation, SIJ has also managed to increase quality control through sophisticated AI, which has massively impacted its operations. The acquisition of scrap metal, a major influence on SIJ’s bottom line, can now be influenced through advanced detection systems that can detect impurities, thus representing huge savings when it comes to procurement. “The conservative saving is €1.4m,” he says.
The
digital transformation at SIJ is touching every aspect of the company’s growth and
is certainly an ongoing journey rather than a destination. “We are not an IT
company, that’s understood,” Arshinov says. “But we are supporting services
inside the business, and of course our main concern will always be supporting
the production of steel. But we’re not there yet.”
