It’s been a tumultuous year. In just the span of a few weeks, COVID-19 emerged unexpectedly and abruptly altered almost every corner of the commercial insurance space. Stock market and GDP forecasts have whipsawed as economists and investors have tried to make sense of frequently shifting news. Now we’re in a contentious and unpredictable election cycle.
Divining the future is always a challenge, but lately it’s become especially difficult. During periods of intense change, traditional patterns and precedents lose their predictive power.
Regression-style tools that provide data extrapolations become a useless blur. The average workers’ comp claim duration of 2019, for example, will look very different than it will in 2020.
Litigation and fraud may emerge in new forms, with most new types passing undetected by screens developed from prior data.
One approach that can help companies navigate the uncertainty is artificial intelligence (AI), which is highly sensitive to new data and tends to react immediately, creating a dynamically updated vision of the future.