“It is heart-warming that business practices, including insurance procedures, are changing for the better in the contemporary global environment. However, the possibility of the negativity of AI must be considered more critically,” said the President of the Volta Regional House of Chiefs (VRHC), Togbe Tepre Hodo IV.

He was speaking at the just-ended 2023 Chartered Insurance Institute of Ghana (CIIG) Educational Conference in Ho. About 200 insurance practitioners and brokerage firms from across the country attended the conference which looked into Business Development on AI, Underwriting Perspectives on AI and Claims Perspectives on AI, among others.

Togbe Tepre Hodo, the Paramount Chief of Anfoega, maintained that in the zeal to enhance customer service and satisfaction, AI must not overtake humans in decision-making.                                                                     

Further, he said, much as AI would help reduce fiddling of insurance claims to the barest minimum, individual confidentialities must be respected, even in AI's critical analysis of data.

The President of the Ghana Insurers Association, Seth Aklasi, said AI had emerged as a pivotal force, enabling machines to learn from data, discern patterns and make decisions independently, without human intervention. 

“These attributes are of great significance in an industry such as the insurance sector, which handles vast volumes of data,” he added.

Mr Aklasi noted that the advent of AI had presented insurers with an opportunity to address the question of how to effectively leverage massive collections of data accumulated over decades to open a realm of great possibilities for the insurance sector.

He observed that AI played a central role in essential functions such as underwriting, claims processing, customer service, fraud detection and risk management in its capacity for extensive data analysis, heightened precision, automation, personalisation and fraud detection.