By Christoph Plenio, vice president, R&D, Innovation Foundry lead for CCC Information Services Inc.AI is changing how insurers do business. Accelerating decisions. Improving outcomes. Constantly adapting to customized rules and permutations. This isn’t a vision, but the reality for more than 50 insurance carriers working with CCC across AI use cases.In conversations and media, AI is often discussed as a concept. That’s yesterday’s news. Today, AI is a proven factor in improving experiences and processes for countless policyholders. For example:

• AI applied to a single photo can predict repairable versus total loss claims, resulting in real-time decisions that don’t leave policyholders waiting days or weeks to know the fate of their vehicle.

• AI applied to auto damage estimates flag outliers based on carrier-specific rules and guidelines, identifying line-level items that appear out of the norm, and resulting in greater estimate accuracy.

• AI-powered estimating automatically predicts which parts are damaged, whether they can be repaired or need to be replaced, and approximate labor hours, boosting appraiser productivity.

• AI-powered 3rd-party injury evaluations ensure accurate assessments of impact severity, availability of complete injury causation analytics, and that medical bill review is accomplished in the most efficient and effective manner for the third-party adjuster.

These are just a few examples of the near touchless claims experience that exists today with people engaging where necessary to confirm AI-led claims flow from accident detection, to first notice of loss, to predictive method of inspection and beyond.This is a small snapshot of AI today.Tomorrow’s AI will empower even more business decisions earlier in the process and with even greater precision. AI run on edge devices, such as mobile phones, will detect contextual information from the accident scene while augmented reality technologies deployed on these same mobile phones will more fully engage consumers. And AI-powered accident reconstruction will create the most detailed view of an accident yet, including the vehicle(s) involved, the scene, and related damage. All, delighting the consumer in ways hardly imaginable today.The future of AI has multiple extensions across the insurance enterprise to inform more decisions, experiences, and performance.We are already starting to deliver on this future by processing and learning from more than a trillion dollars of historical data from multiple sources – telematics, driving data, vehicle history, and more – connecting it in real time to provide a view of what happened and what is to come. The future is exciting, but it is important when looking ahead to not overlook the impact AI is already delivering today. And, for CCC and its customers, there’s nothing artificial about that.