The people aspect of change is an essential part of our technology journey. The key to bringing our handlers and the wider business with us is to show that what we are doing and trialling will make their jobs easier and less burdensome. We have all had the experience that the promised benefits from expensive technology investment come to nothing, so tangible results are necessary to show that the benefits are real. We have also all seen and heard the claims by technology suppliers that the shiny new system will mean headcount can be reduced, but this is, in my experience never true! Rather, good technology will change the way people go about their jobs.

There is a degree of excitement in the business around AI – new toys, new tools, and this has to be managed too, as we want the pace of AI adoption to be appropriate for the business. There’s a spectrum of course, with reticence and cynicism at one end, from people who have too often seen new technologies fail to live up to their promise; and with progressives at the other end of the scale, impatient to delegate their drudge work to machines so they can focus on the more interesting investigation and negotiation aspects of their role. As leaders, we have to bring everyone along with us, not just in the need for change, but the appropriate pace of adoption as well.

We are a small organisation relative to others in the insurance space, which means on the one hand we can be fast adopters, but budgets can be an issue. We are, of course, funded by levies from all motor insurers and, ultimately, from their customers’ premiums, so we have to be mindful of this when considering expensive outlay on bespoke technologies. However, an option for us is to piggyback on systems developed and made available to the market by insurers, taking their AI systems’ capabilities and adapting them for our own purposes. This is something we are exploring.