Workshop: Will chatbots be the next PPI scandal?

About the Workshop

You probably remember the PPI scandal - when masses of insurance policies were sold to customers without them realising/understanding what they were buying. This resulted in billions of £’s of compensation being paid out.

AI, in the form of chatbots, could easily take our industry down a path leading to a similar situation, with injustices towards large groups of people leading to class actions and vast payouts. Unlike PPI, this won’t be because of deliberate, conscious choices by insurers, MGAs and brokers to sell something.

This time it is likely to be inadvertent and unintentional - caused by the failure to fully think through the use of chatbot technology to make sure it is ethical, fair and with no inbuilt bias. However, it is likely to be no less costly if it goes wrong.

You don’t know what you don’t know, right? This workshop is designed to show you what you (currently) don’t know – and give you practical ideas on what you can do about it.

This will help you to mitigate, manage and avoid risk to your business.

Who is it for?

This workshop is for anyone whose business uses chatbots to interact with customers:

• Call centre teams for insurers selling direct to the public
• Brokers who have specialist schemes
• Claims teams helping policyholders
• Customer experience & marketing looking at the customer “journey”
• Legal, compliance and risk managers wanting to understand and manage exposure
• Underwriters & product heads looking at how they handle chatbot exposure for other industries 

Learning objectives

By the end of the workshop, you will:

• Understand how chatbots (“large language models”) work and are trained
• Understand how chatbots can make mistakes in live situations – and hallucinate!
• Start to identify your risk tolerance for AI adoption within the customer-facing part of your business
• Have 3 questions to ask 3rd party suppliers of chatbots when choosing who to work with
• Take away 4 concerns to share within your business that should be keeping you awake at night

About Adrian Webb

Adrian has worked in insurance and financial services for 35 years. Latterly, he was the longest serving board director of Gocompare plc. Prior to that, he was CMO at esure Group plc, helped Richard Branson launch Virgin’s banking arm, and was at Direct Line. In 2021 he returned to academia, studying for a PhD and lecturing at the University of Exeter. He is a regular guest lecturer on AI ethics at large firms and other universities.
Adrian’s workshops are always interactive, with views/opinions sought from attendees, and time allowed for Q&A at the end.