How AI is revolutionizing insurance marketing

By Susan Rupe

Insurance marketers are finding that artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT are making them more productive in their jobs. A panel of marketing professionals described their experiences using AI during a recent webinar by AM Best and the Insurance Marketing and Communications Association.

“It’s an exciting time to be a marketer in the industry,” said Mitch Dunford, chief marketing officer with the Risk and Insurance Education Alliance. “It reminds me of the early days of the internet when it was exploding and everybody knew that it was going to change everything, but we weren’t sure exactly how it was going to change things. Here we are again. We know AI is going to be a bigger and bigger deal and the insurance industry is embracing it.”

“It’s a brave new world out there for marketers in the insurance industry,” he continued. “There are so many new AI tools being rolled out on a regular basis. I think it’s important that we all pay attention to what those tools can do for us.”

Dunford said his organization’s CEO said that AI probably will replace some jobs, “but the reality is that a human being who knows and understands AI will be more of a threat to our jobs than AI itself. So it’s important that we all learn how to leverage its power and use it well.”

RIEA created an AI tool called Alibot to help the organization’s students and participants learn and leverage the power of AI in what they do, not only in their marketing but in other areas of the business, Dunford said.

He added that his organization uses Riverside FM for podcasts. Riverside records the podcast, but the AI tools inside of Riverside automatically create a summary based on the podcast content that creates keywords, takeaways, titles and chapters. It will even create a transcript. You can edit the transcript and it will edit the audio file in real time.

Anne Ellis, vice president of marketing with Crum & Foster, said her company’s data team built its own version of ChatGPT it calls Genie. Genie interfaces with ChatGPT. Ellis said her company’s prompts, the way the prompts are refined and the content that comes back all remain within the company’s firewall. The company maintains its intellectual property rights to that content.

Crum & Foster uses Genie mainly as an organizational tool, she said. For example, the company’s CEO has written emails to employees every Friday for years. All those emails were fed into Genie. Now whenever the CEO is asked for his opinion on something, he can go to Genie and cite the email communication where he said it.

“You can learn about the history of insurance, our company or products, or just use ChatGPT through Genie,” Ellis said. “We try to encourage people to use it because it’s a productivity tool. But we just wanted to keep our information safe.”

Kasey Connors, vice president of marketing operations with Trusted Choice, said her organization finds AI a valuable tool in repurposing content.

“For example, maybe you have a long form blog post, you can turn that quickly into some ideas for social graphics or social media channels,” she said. “We also do a lot of webinars educating independent agents. So we have a webinar, we have it on YouTube, pop that YouTube link also into Gemini as they’re both Google products. Then you can help take an outline on that, turn that into a blog or a social media post.”

Connors said that as her organization discusses AI with its member agents, “we tell them, these tools take time to learn like any technology. Make sure it’s the right business decision for your organization and learn how to implement it correctly.”

Susan Rupe is editor in chief, magazine, for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].