As ML and AI systems become more common in driving the customer experience across industries, consumers are voicing heightened distrust. This piece by Kyle Wiggers in VentureBeat rounded up a couple of surveys of insurance customers, one showing a paltry 17% who would trust AI to review their insurance claims and another showing little movement in public sentiment about "trading" their personal data for more advantageous pricing. The answer may lie in approaches like those enacted by the Dutch Association of Insurers in January that require companies to prepare to explain how their systems make decisions before they go live.
Recently, Lemonade, a leading InsurTech company in the US, was hit with a lawsuit claiming that the company failed to responsibly respect consumers’ privacy and unethically used consumer data. If successful, this class action would represent a landmark court case as the first major decision related to the use of AI in the insurance industry in the US. Regardless, the case presents an object lesson for business leaders across industries to take positive, immediate steps towards implementing a comprehensive approach to AI governance.