Insurance companies swap employees for artificial intelligence

In early 2017, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance embarked on job cuts, replacing them with artificial intelligence. It is reported by Quartz with reference to the press release of the Japanese insurance company.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is going to invest 200 million yen (about $1.7 million) in the deployment of IBM Watson Explorer and spend about $128 thousand a year to maintain this system. Thanks to her, the company will be able to save $1.1 million annually on salaries for employees, thereby recouping investments software IBM in less than two years.

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Office

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance hopes to supercomputer Watson increase productivity by 30%. This software is used by the company to analyze documents from medical institutions (medical histories, medical records of patients, diagnoses and procedures completed; analyze unstructured data, images, audio and video files) and the distribution of insurance payments.

In January 2017, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance began laying off employees, transferring their functions to the IBM Watson Explorer system. By March 2017, it is planned to cut 34 jobs.

In fiscal 2016, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance made 132,000 payments. Despite the active transition to computer systems, decisions on payments will still be made by people, the company assured.

Japan has become one of the first places to introduce artificial intelligence into everyday life because the country is leading the development of robots and in recent years there has been a decrease in the share of elderly people. Earlier, the Japanese insurance company Dai-Ichi Life Insurance began using Watson to estimate the amount of payments (although the number of personnel did not decrease), and Japan Post Insurance is interested in a similar project.^[1]

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