E41 - Tim Johnson - The Present and Future of Automation in the Insurance Industry

Tim Johnson is a veteran professional in the insurance industry.
He has been working at Suncorp in various roles and scopes since
2005. He began his journey at Suncorp as a Manager Claims Design
and now, multiple roles later, he is the Head of Automation.


Suncorp Group Limited is a top 50 ASX-listed company with over
9.5 million customers and 13,000 employees. The Suncorp Group
offers insurance, banking and wealth products and services
through some of Australia and New Zealand’s most recognised
financial brands.


At Suncorp, Tim is one of the pioneers of the automation
capability for Suncorp building the Insurance capability during
his time leading the shared service operations team. He also
performed as a CFO Insurance to support a leadership transition.
Over the last decade of running Operations, Tim has led large on
and offshore teams with the aim of driving improved customer
experience and cost outcomes for Suncorp. Intelligent Automation
was a logical next step to continue this push for faster, simpler
delivery to Suncorp’s customers.


Prior to joining Suncorp, Tim spent over 14 years as an Army
Officer and a few years consulting across a wide variety of
industries.


In this exclusive interview, Tim Johnson shares with us about a
lot of developments in the use of automation and AI in the
insurance and financial industry. He also motivates the industry
participants to come forward in the journey of implementing these
emerging technologies in their business.


Here are a few major aspects discussed:


The potential of AI incubators in furthering the large-scale
implementation of AI and automation throughout Australia.

How the corporation and government can benefit from these
incubators.

Various examples and use-cases of intelligent automation in
the insurance industry, such as zero-touch claims processing
using IBM Watson and applying computer vision.

The importance of taking a human-machine approach while
designing and implementing AI solutions.

The challenges Tim faced while using automation in insurance
and how to overcome the challenges.

How to combine analytics, automation, and AI to get the next
stage of digital transformation.

What should be the approach to incorporating AI and
automation into your business and for finding the appropriate
business cases to target?

How all of this should be guided by a customer-centric
approach and philosophy?



Above all, what Tim wants us to know that starting on the journey
of AI and automation doesn’t have to be expensive and
time-consuming. You can start quickly with a minimum viable
project and then scale-up from there. What really matters is to
start!


So, if you are thinking about using AI and automation for your
business processes, especially in the insurance and the financial
industry, this is the episode you should definitely lend an ear
to!


#BusinessAnalytics #Insurance #ArtificialIntelligence(AI)
#Automation #CustomerExperience #DataScience