Is everyone tired of talking about AI yet, or is the excitement still buzzing?
Every day, I am inundated with articles and videos about AI – how it’s the next step for the workforce of the future, how it is nothing more than a plagiarism machine, how it allows people to exercise their creativity in ways they couldn’t before, how it steals from artists without permission or credit and so on.
As with all things, all of the above is both true and false at the same time, as nothing is as black and white as social media would have you believe. By now, we are all quite familiar with the risks of AI in a professional setting – it is, after all, just an advanced data processing machine, and even an LLM like ChatGPT can only make guesses at what you are truly looking for. Sometimes, it creates things out of thin air but couches these hallucinations in a language that invokes confidence.
Many companies have also come under pressure for using AI in their advertising and marketing collaterals, as society at large comes to the defence of artists, creatives and the protection of their livelihoods.
However, there is also no escaping AI – all our daily technology now bakes AI into their service, from Google’s Gemini to Microsoft’s Copilot, constantly asking you if you need their help. At the same time, the talent pool grows younger, and this new generation of workers are excited and eager to play around with this new, shiny toy, even at the workplace.
Don’t get me wrong, AI can be good, if it is properly trained and built to conduct specific tasks. The (re)insurance industry, for instance, has a large volume of rote, repetitive work that takes up a lot of time for a human employee, but can be processed by AI in minutes. For the first time since AI first entered society’s consciousness, it can actually deliver on the promise to ‘free up the human for more important, valuable tasks’.
The introduction of agentic AI (which, according to Google’s Gemini, is “a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on building autonomous systems capable of making decisions and performing tasks without constant human intervention”) is the next step for AI in the workplace. It has the potential to truly transform the insurance industry, grinding away at the human inefficiencies that have slowed it down.
That’s what a large portion of this issue is about – how the insurance industry across Asia is adopting AI, what agentic AI means for the industry, and what the risks, the regulations, the challenges and the opportunities are.
Socially, I believe that the rampant, unregulated use of AI is bad for society, especially as AI-generated images and videos become more and more lifelike and realistic, and indistinguishable from real-life. The next generation of kids need to be trained on recognising reality and treating AI as a tool, not as a grand arbiter of truth.
But in the workplace, AI has fewer social implications, especially in the way the insurance industry has been using it. From this perspective, it has a greater potential for doing good.
Alexa, play OK Computer by Radiohead! A
Ahmad Zaki
Editorial director
Asia Insurance Review