“The conversations (around AI) last year were about ‘what could we do, what are people doing and what should we think about’. The conversations now are ‘here are the use cases.’”

This is an observation from Google’s MD Australia and New Zealand Melanie Silva at the Australian Financial Review AI Summit last week. I enjoyed participating in a panel discussion with Cosima Marriner, Kim Krogh Andersen, Melanie Silva and Damien Spillane which highlighted how far we’ve come in implementing AI, particularly GenAI, across corporate Australia in the past year.

Traditional AI and Machine Learning aren’t new to Suncorp Group (parent company of brands including AAMI, Suncorp and GIO) and we’re on the cusp of scaling AI use cases across our whole business.

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Photo credit: Michael Quelch

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Just one example is how we combine geospatial images of neighbourhoods (taken from above several times a year) with AI models and customer data. This allows us to warn customers as severe weather approaches and check in immediately after to gauge the extent of any damage, sometimes before the customer has even lodged a claim. We can then start to mobilise our people and potentially order the building materials we know we’ll need.

We’re piloting the use of GenAI to support our claims managers by summarising reams of data and generating contextualised claims information. However, this isn’t coming at the expense of a personalised customer experience.

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We’re creating learning and development opportunities for our people to engage with AI as well. We’ve built an environment for them to experiment safely with productivity tools like Microsoft Copilot, as well as opportunities to put AI to the test to solve real customer problems though our “Hackathons”, AI conferences and formal training and reskill programs. This enthusiasm of our people to learn has been fantastic.

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It’s exciting to move beyond the experimentation sandbox and the discussions about the possibilities of AI. But truly embedding AI and extracting value from this rapidly evolving technology takes a whole enterprise approach, rather than pockets of enthusiastic individuals. There is clearly important risk, governance, ethical, employee, technology, and customer considerations.

With a clear strategy in place, a roadmap of simple and powerful use cases, and strong engagement across the whole organisation, I’m excited to see how AI will transform the customer experience in the moments that matter.

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