Dutch Insurer Scraps Old-Style Chat Bots Amid Uneven AI Rollout
(Bloomberg) -- NN Group NV is replacing pre-programmed chat bots in client-facing roles with a version that can interact more naturally with humans, further evidence of the continued but uneven roll-out of artificial intelligence in financial services.
The insurance firm, one of the largest in the Netherlands, has also launched an AI assistance tool which call-center staff can use to answer client questions. That has resulted in a marked improvement in the response quality, Chief Executive Officer David Knibbe said in an interview on Tuesday.
'I know very few people who like chat bots,' Knibbe said. When clients get an AI assistant on the line rather than an actual person, their 'most frequently asked question is, 'Can I speak to a human being?''
The Dutch insurer announced at an investor day on Tuesday that it's planning to spend €450 million ($509 million) on digital investments through 2027. That's expected to result in €180 million in savings including job cuts along with some additional revenue, Knibbe said.
The move by NN Group highlights that Europe's financial services industry is keen to seize on AI as a powerful tool to boost productivity, but the technology's largely untested potential to do so means that corporate learning curves are steep.
The payments firm Klarna Group Plc earlier this month said it's slowing AI driven job cuts. 'As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too-predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,' CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said at the time.
NN Group initially spent much time developing AI capabilities for cross-selling and trying to develop new services, but the firm didn't pay enough attention on whether the use cases would be easy to spread throughout the company, Knibbe said. That has changed, he added, citing the recent development of a marketing model in Poland that could subsequently be rolled out quickly in Romania.
The insurance company had made 'a lot of mistakes' when seeking to introduce AI, Knibbe said.
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