Unstructured Data: Finding Strategies for Optimization

The surge in available data due to digitalization poses a challenge for organizations, with 80% being unstructured, according to Accenture. Companies grapple with organizing data from diverse sources, including online portals, social media, eApps, and emails. Insurers, too, face these challenges but stand to gain significantly from organized data. Efficient organization frees up resources, enhances security, and provides insights for optimizing product design, marketing, sales, and underwriting.

Automating Data Collection

Effective data collection strategies continually analyze available data sources and identify inefficiencies. Automation allows a consistent structure to be applied to the captured data. This provides insurers with a wealth of data primed to identify and solve business challenges, including customer satisfaction, safety risk reduction, simplified underwriting, and more. Many manual processes can instead be handled by automation tools, including:

• OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) to extract personal data from forms
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems seamlessly connecting and capturing data from web forms and customer communications
• AI tools to collect and analyze data from photo, video, and audio formats

Centralized Data Organization

While efficient data collection is important, data centralization is imperative to reap the full benefits. The reality, however, for most insurers is that their data is spread across multiple systems, in multiple formats, making it difficult to pull aggregated insights from all available data sources. There have been technological advancements in this space; however, each comes with its own obstacles. Cloud solutions have helped tackle unstructured data challenges but can also create new data security concerns. Data integration solutions are helping, but they can struggle to effectively structure data across multiple systems. Until a comprehensive solution is found, insurers need to take a more focused approach and instead concentrate on improving a specific aspect of their data landscape. With the right mix of tools, insurers can begin to more efficiently and effectively solve specific business challenges.

A Case Study with Protex AI

Manufacturing facilities and warehouses often have CCTV cameras in place for real-time human monitoring. Amongst safety professionals, it’s recognized that the utilization of CCTV footage to gain insight into unsafe worker behaviors is low. Protex AI, a software company based in Dublin, Ireland, saw the collected video footage as an underutilized resource. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze unstructured CCTV footage, Protex AI’s privacy-preserving platform plugs into existing CCTV infrastructure and uses its computer vision technologies to capture unsafe incidents autonomously. Having 24/7 risk detection enables safety professionals to gain greater visibility of risk across their facilities, equipping them to revolutionize how they make data-informed proactive safety decisions that help contribute to a safer work environment. Protex AI’s in-depth reporting and storyboard functionality allows clients to gain insights into trends of unsafe behaviors and collaborate on learnings to instigate effective corrective actions and training programs.

In one installation, Protex AI’s client, Marks and Spencer, a major British multinational retailer with over 80,000 employees globally, saw an 80% reduction in incidents within the first 10 weeks of deployment and a positive shift in employees’ perception of their company’s care for their safety. Much of this reduction was attributed to the efforts of their safety team to quickly identify areas of risk in their distribution centers and implement impactful safety programs amongst their workers. Within the U.S., employers spend nearly 1% of their monthly payroll on workers' comp benefits, a significant cost much attributed to the safety risks present in many workplaces. Protex AI is an example of a tool that insurers can leverage in partnership with employers to better identify and reduce such risks. Historically, unstructured video data was difficult to effectively monitor, but with Protex AI, insurers can now see the full workplace risk picture.

Join the Digitalization Conversation

Explore the full whitepaper for comprehensive insights into addressing challenges in insurance digitalization. As part of the Insuretechs Collective, Protex AI invites you to navigate the duality of digitalization, transforming challenges into opportunities. Join us in reshaping the narrative of insurance digitalization and revolutionizing safety practices in the workplace.