Japanese insurance firm Fukoku Mutual is replacing its 34-strong claims assessment workforce with an advanced form of IBM’s Watson Explorer AI. There are two primary reasons for this move:
- AI is more mature and dependable now – The neural network that underpins Watson can calculate payouts to policyholders earlier than the human staffed claims department (albeit with a focus on a certain number of claims now)
- The return on investment for AI is making more sense – The move is expected to increase productivity by 30 percent and save around 140 million yen per year for Fukoku Mutual.
Fukoku’s Watson system can analyze and interpret claim data including unstructured text, images, audio and video. It will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and analysing other documents such as outpatient data, surgery, procedure reports and hospital stays to draw insight necessary for calculating payouts to the policyholders.

Fukoku Mutual’s move is a case of human supervised autonomy to start with, which is intended to achieve complete autonomy in the future
In addition to determining claim payments, the system will also be able to check customer’s cases against their insurance contracts to find any special coverage clauses – a measure expected to prevent payment oversights. While the use of AI will dramatically reduce the time needed to calculate claim payouts – which totalled 132,000 for Fukoku in 2015 – the sums will not be paid until they have been approved by a human staff, a case of human supervised autonomy to start with, which is intended at achieve complete autonomy in the future.
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