Trailblazing Insurtech: AI-Driven Solutions and IBM’s Z Ecosystem
In today’s insurtech market, AI-powered technology is at the forefront of innovation and continues to raise the bar of next-generation functionality. Sapiens’ partner IBM is doing just that with its Z ecosystem and new telum chip microprocessor. In this week’s podcast, Meredith Stowell, Vice President, IBM Z Ecosystem, IBM, joins host Caryn Warner, Sapiens’ Vice President of Marketing, to discuss how IBM’s Z platform helps bolster cyber resilience and optimize hybrid cloud environments, and how its telum chip’s AI inferencing makes it all possible.
Caryn Warner|Meredith Stowell
Caryn Warner: Hello, welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I’m your host, Caryn Warner, Vice President of Marketing at Sapiens, and I’m so glad that you’re out there listening. This is where we discuss the latest news, trends, and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology spectrum. The insurance and insurertech industry landscape is constantly evolving with new and innovative technologies which continue to raise the bar in terms of next-generation functionality. IBM Z’s ecosystem and its new telum chip together bolster cyber resilience and optimize hybrid cloud environments. In today’s podcast, Meredith Stowell, Vice President, IBM Z Ecosystem, IBM, joins us to break down these advances and how they and other AI-driven solutions will continue to provide more robust risk advice and overall industry support. Meredith, so glad that you’re with us today. Welcome!
Meredith Stowell: Thanks, Karen. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Caryn Warner: So let’s begin. I’m always interested to learn how our guests arrived at where they are in their tech career, especially our female tech leaders. Would you share with our listeners some history behind how you got into technology, and IBM Z specifically?
Meredith Stowell: Certainly, Karen. You know, if you had asked me when I was in college if I would be in a technology job today, the answer probably would have been, what does that even mean? My degree, it’s an international finance and commerce and I had a minor in international business diplomacy. But, you know, as I started my career, what I found is that I loved improving processes through automation and I loved how tech can help people do their jobs. In fact, I was a business analyst when I was introduced to Cognos, and it’s a business intelligence analytics technology, and that truly changed my life. I fell in love with the fact that technology could do the busy work, like pulling the right data together so I could actually focus on analyzing the insights and driving business outcomes. I loved it so much that I wanted to share this knowledge with others. So I became an implementation consultant for Cognos, which was then acquired by IBM. My career, it continued by following what I love doing, helping others, whether it’s taking advantage of technology or through leadership to help them be their best and to find their passion. So you never know where your path is going to lead. So my advice is try as many things as possible, because you may not know what you truly love until you try it. And I am still doing that today within IBM Z and building skills in the marketplace for this incredible technology that underpins our daily lives.
Caryn Warner: Great advice, Meredith. Thanks for sharing your career journey. It’s truly inspiring. So to switch gears, the insurance climate is evolving and morphing to fit the needs of a constantly changing landscape. Things like AI specifically come to mind, customers now expect better risk advice and support with regulators demanding these services be provided equitably, securely, and responsibly. How do you see the industry and IBM’s Z addressing these needs?
Meredith Stowell: Sure, Karen. You know, artificial intelligence, AI, has gone from a world where companies are thinking about running their business, plus doing some AI to help it, to a world that is AI first. So leading companies for the next decade or two, they’regoing to be the ones that decide that they will be a AI first. And what does that mean? Well, it’s about how clients infuse AI into their applications, how they automate their workflows, replace their workflows, and even get to that ultimate point that AI does the work. And it’s the single decision to be AI first that’s going to dictate how they operate, how they work with employees, and how they work with their customers and suppliers. AI first is today’s world. But it’s just not one thing or one technology. It’s leveraging that combination of all advancements to date, whether it’s machine learning all the way up to Generative AI; they don’t replace one another. Therefore, AI-first organizations, they’re going to be required to use both traditional AI and as well as Generative AI. But trust, ethics, and explainability, they need to be at the core. And IBM is committed to this and there are so many use cases for AI, whether it is employee productivity, which is a key area, and that includes customer service workflows. So customer engagement analytics and AI-infused virtual assistants or intelligent chatbots to help clients provide a superior level of personalized customer service, when and where their customers want to communicate. Or as you mentioned, advisor assistance. Arm those front-line teams with 360-degree insights to facilitate that targeted response and immediate fulfillment of upsell opportunities. Regulatory compliance. Decrease that manual burden of complying with documentation regulations, increased productivity of compliance analysts and audit staff. Use AI to create that cross-reference of all lineage that demonstrates compliance to regulations or identify gaps. You know, ultimately reduce regulatory risks, costs, and investigation. There are just so many possibilities. And it’s the technology, that technology such as IBM’s Z and Watson X with advancements such as the telum chip with AI inferencing accelerators that are built into the hardware that’s really making this possible.
Caryn Warner: That’s really revolutionary. Thank you for that. So to drill down to an IBM-specific technology, its new telum chip. How does IBM see telum and AI impacting cyber resiliency and hybrid cloud?
Meredith Stowell: Absolutely. Let me break that one down, too. So when we asked our clients, what was the top challenge that they had with AI? You know, it wasn’t building the models or even training the models. It was actually putting those models into production at scale. And that’s what the telum chip is all about. It accelerates AI inferencing or scoring at the chip level without impacting service level agreements. So from a hybrid cloud perspective, what that means is that the model building, the training, it can take place on fit for purpose infrastructure, for example, leverage all of the capabilities that are available in the public cloud. But then once that model is ready to be deployed and embedded in the real-time transaction processing, bring that same model to the IBM Z platform, where the transactions and that secure data resides. In fact, 70% of the world’s transactions from a value perspective, run through IBM’s Z systems around the world. So that AI scoring, it can be integrated into those transactions real time, ensuring that 100% of the transactions can be scored without any impact to the service level agreements because of that on-chip acceleration. Now, prior to this technical advancement, only a portion of transactions were being scored, and as a result, you might get false negatives as well as missed fraud, which is going to cost businesses and has cost businesses millions of dollars. Now, within the insurance industry, this could translate to claims fraud. In fact, a state government in the US, they realized that their process to determine fraudulent claims was very manual. It was intensive, and it just could not scale. It would take up to 40 hours per case. Now, with the use of machine learning and the telum chip, they were able to achieve claim processing automation, with processing time reduced to a matter of seconds.
Another example, insurance underwriting. An insurer in Europe, they wanted to provide [an] insurance offer recommendation system both to provide faster and more accurate recommendations that would enable them to improve their underwriting process. They applied the AI capabilities on their Z 16 system to process insurance offer recommendations faster and more accurately. And then by unlocking these hidden data patterns through natural language processing, they were able to in near-real time ensure privacy and security, while they also achieved 94% accuracy and prediction results.
Caryn Warner: That’s incredible. Wow. So, I tell you what, if our listeners could remember just one thing about IBM Z in the insurance industry, just to crystallize it, what would you want that to be?
Meredith Stowell: Oh, goodness. That’s hard to narrow down to just one thing, but if I had to say just one thing, it would be future proof. The IBM Z system, it’s responsible for running billions of secured mission-critical transactions that are powering the global economy. Therefore, it is consistently bringing breakthrough innovation to the market to ensure our clients can not only excel and be agile in the marketplace, but do so in a secure, scalable, reliable, in fact, the Z in IBM Z stands for “zero downtime,” but also a sustainable manner. The IBM Z is the greenest server on the planet. So whether it’s the telum chip enabling AI to not only be developed, but actually deployed at scale, or bringing industry-first quantum safe encryption to the market, such that even if data is being harvested today by bad actors, they’re not going to be able to decrypt it, when quantum advancements are made in the future. So future proof, that’s IBM’s Z!
Caryn Warner: Great, definitely memorable. So one last question. Would you be able to talk a little more about the partnership between IBM and Sapiens, and how it’s moving, insurtech forward?
Meredith Stowell: Absolutely, Karen. My pleasure. The only certainty I would say in today’s markets is uncertainty. Therefore, it truly takes an ecosystem of ecosystems to deliver innovative solutions and to solve some of the biggest business challenges that are out there. And IBM and Sapiens partner to do this for our mutual clients. And as the IBM Z platform continues to innovate with industry-first capabilities, it’s this close partnership between IBM and Sapiens that ensures that these capabilities are leveraged, as Sapiens also continues to innovate and enhance your solutions and the insurtech space. So ultimately, this partnership brings the best of both worlds together, to innovate and solve our clients’ biggest challenges.
Caryn Warner: And we are looking so much forward to that. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Meredith. IBM’s Z ecosystem and its new telum chip are groundbreaking technologies, and I can’t wait to see what innovations IBM and Sapiens can build together to benefit our collective customers. And to our listeners, as always, thank you so much for spending your time with us here today. We love hearing from you, so if you have comments or would like to follow us on social media, please reach out to us on our channels. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We’ve got more coming, so be sure to tune in next time to Sapiens Insurance 360.
