Social inflation is costing insurers—here’s how cloud and AI can help
Of the many factors contributing to the rising cost of insurance, social inflation—the phenomenon of increased liability claims and changing societal attitudes toward litigation—is a challenge that may get worse before it gets better. While increased liability claims may seem beneficial to individual policyholders, the cost is ultimately absorbed by insurers, resulting in higher insurance premiums and stricter underwriting practices, which in turn widen the insurance gap and affect affordability.
Subtle and complex in nature, social inflation impacts profitability by driving up claims payments. Outpacing economic inflation by 1.7% in the United States from 2017 to 2022,1 social inflation drove a 57% surge in liability claims over the past 10 years,2 and led to a USD20 billion increase in commercial auto liability payouts from 2010 to 2019.3
In response, insurers are increasingly turning to technology, particularly AI, to help predict trends, enhance underwriting processes, and automate workflows. And now, with the potential application of a cloud-based solution that lets companies explore insights collaboratively, insurers can have more options.
Helping insurers forge effective long-term technology strategies is core to our vision for intelligent insurance and our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. In the case of social inflation, cloud and AI can help insurers mitigate the incidence and impact of unpredictable outcomes.
How cloud and AI can help solve the social inflation challenge
To improve competitiveness amid a volatile landscape, most insurers have invested in cloud modernization over the past decade. This provides an essential foundation for many critical benefits. For example, solutions built on Microsoft Power BI can track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs), perform predictive analytics, and generate real-time insights.
Generative AI is now expanding upon these core benefits to deliver dramatic improvements in productivity, operations, and enhanced workflows. For many firms, the first step in realizing value from generative AI is to adapt Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is integrated seamlessly in Microsoft productivity applications. Drawing on the full scope of Microsoft 365 data within the firm (such as emails, Word and Excel documents, Teams communications, and more) Microsoft 365 Copilot can, for instance, help a claims analyst generate a report that draws on the best available information from research reports, emails, calls, and external data sources.
Many firms are also building custom agents to address specific use cases on challenges such as streamlining processes, enhancing claims processing workflows, and improving overall productivity. Additional value is also being unlocked as firms transform their unstructured data into structured formats, which enables even more robust predictive models and other advanced data analytics.
To help address social inflation, generative AI and agent functionality can be used to gain important new insights, such as the following:
- News monitoring: AI-powered tools can continuously scan and analyze news articles from myriad sources. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), these tools can identify relevant news items, summarize key points, and highlight trends or significant events. This helps businesses stay updated on industry developments, competitor activities, and market shifts.
- Market insights: AI can process vast amounts of market data, such as economic indicators, consumer behavior patterns, and stock prices. With the power of machine learning algorithms, AI can detect patterns, predict market trends, and offer actionable insights. An AI agent can then present these insights seamlessly in daily workflows, helping decision-makers to make informed choices.
- Marketing campaigns: AI can track the performance of marketing campaigns by analyzing data from multiple channels such as social media, email, and web analytics. It can measure engagement, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI), providing real-time feedback on campaign effectiveness. AI agents can also assist in generating reports and suggesting optimizations based on the data.
Looking forward, these capabilities will be further enhanced with agentic AI—autonomous systems that can plan, adapt, and act to achieve goals, requiring minimal human input as they interact with other tools and environments. For insurers, agentic AI can help in ways such as the following:
- Automating data collection: Agents can autonomously gather data from multiple sources, helping ensure that information is always up to date.
- Providing real-time alerts: Agents can monitor and respond to specific events or changes in data and send real-time alerts to stakeholders to help ensure prompt responses.
- Generating insights: By continuously analyzing data, agents can identify patterns, correlations, and trends, helping businesses to stay ahead of the curve.
Confidential computing: Opening new opportunities while protecting sensitive data
To gain new benefits from more sensitive data, such as claims or confidential information, an additional layer of security and confidence is now offered by Azure confidential computing.
Azure confidential computing creates a protected environment called Azure Confidential Clean Rooms that lets different teams within a company or across multiple companies perform joint data analysis and develop risk models, fraud detection models, and more, using advanced encryption techniques to anonymize data.
Across the financial services industry, confidential computing is increasingly being enlisted to help unlock new opportunities. For example, financial messaging provider Swift is using it in an innovative anomaly detection model, enabling the model to be trained on distributed datasets without copying or moving data from secure locations. Beyond regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, confidential computing is also being used for solutions in retail, manufacturing, and energy sectors.
In addressing social inflation, confidential computing can help insurers understand the hidden drivers that contribute to rising costs, distort risk assessments, and influence claim outcomes. This involves identifying patterns and connections between contributing factors, such as litigation trends or the influence of social media and viral campaigns that can amplify public sentiment.
With the power of AI combined with confidential computing, actuaries, underwriters, and claims professionals can use natural language prompts to ask questions of data, semantic search can recognize their meaning and intent, and the system can write coherent responses and deliver appropriate resources. This offers an entirely new and transformative way where, by analyzing interconnected factors, insurers can identify high-risk cases and insights that suggest propensity towards social inflation claims, enabling insurance to develop proactive strategies such as early settlements or policy adjustments in high-risk areas.
Of course, bringing teams or organizations together to consider the adoption of a broad solution approach like confidential computing involves more than just technology. It also requires structure, guidance, cooperation, and leadership. Microsoft is here to help for the long run and enable such collaboration starting with the industry leading Microsoft Azure cloud platform, and our ongoing commitment to security and responsible AI, and our long-term leadership in insurance and financial services.
We are excited to partner with insurers and the industry at large to help innovate new solutions and business opportunities through cloud and AI. To get started with your business, reach out to your Microsoft representative and we’ll be happy to explore the possibilities.
Learn more
- To learn more about our solutions for insurers, visit our Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services website.
- For a deeper look at confidential computing, read the Azure Confidential Computing Blog.
1 Swiss Re Institute, Social inflation: litigation costs drive claims inflation, September 2024.
3 Boston Consulting Group, P&C Insurance topics for 2024.
