May 15, 2024

A Proven Process for Integrating AI into Your Systems

Robots & Pencils

3 Stages for Integrating AI into Your Products, Workflows, and Technology

When integrating AI into your business, product, and UX development processes, the best approaches combine research and experimentation. As you uncover, explore, and test opportunities to drive impact with AI, you must remain intentional and open-minded at every step. Large language models (LLMS), in particular, are easy to connect to applications. On the other hand, figuring out how well they perform in specific situations and optimizing their performance is complex and unpredictable.

Below is the three-stage process Robots & Pencils uses to solve these problems and align leading LLM technology with your strategic goals. These stages offer a well-planned trajectory for integrating AI while rapidly de-risking efforts and accelerating return on investment.

Stage 1: AI Strategy and Planning

This stage involves learning, understanding, and aligning stakeholders around your top AI use case or product opportunity. Clients will undergo a guided discovery process. Specifically, you and your teams will consider what product or process you want to optimize. You’ll discuss short- and long-term goals and decide how to measure success. You’ll also identify known risks. With this information, you can begin to select and prioritize features for your AI-based product.

At this point, our consultants support you in thinking about change management. Addressing this early will help employees stay aligned and on board with integrating AI into their workflows. Proper change management prevents changes from seeming too abrupt. It also alleviates fears about AI and its implications for your team’s jobs.

You can often complete the planning stage in a couple of weeks. However, expect to return to it regularly for different applications and business opportunities.

Stage 2: Risk and Solution Exploration

In stage 2, you explore and address risks to pave the way for a smooth road ahead. Here, we help you build out and determine how AI integrates and engages your technologies and systems. This phase focuses on defining the UI framework, platform, prompts, tech, data, sources, and training models. We cover everything you need for building a new product or integrating AI into an existing system. As we analyze front- and back-end requirements, our designers create illustrative flows for the UI. At the same time, our engineers experiment with conversational prompts. The goal is to determine what best generates the desired conversational flows.

Together, we will locate essential tools, technologies, and integrations we can leverage to build the platform. We will identify data sources, ML models, and custom training needs. This stage also covers evaluating tools and platforms that may accelerate learnings or actual product-build efforts. We also collaborate with you to identify industry-specific regulations and other business risks. As needed, we consult legal or compliance teams to de-risk these items ahead of development and launch.

Stage 3: Prototyping and Development

In this stage, we bring your ideas to life with a functional AI-powered prototype. Here, we design and build your Proof of Concept, connect integrations, and measure and test efficacy.We focus on the experience first and iteratively refine AI prompts. From there, we measure the consistency and quality of the AI output and perform usability testing.

To provide an experience you and other stakeholders can easily interact with, we prototype the key UI features that govern the expression of the LLM. These features can include chat, visualization, and video. On the back end, we connect the prototype front end to the LLM, data sources, and other functional integrations. This period is also an opportunity for building a road map with project findings, prioritized features, and remaining risks.

Keys to Successfully Integrating AI into Your Tech

Applying design thinking to your LLM project is imperative to success in every stage. In design thinking, you empathize with and prioritize user needs in selecting and defining product features. This approach ensures that the resulting product aligns with actual use cases and directly addresses user challenges and desires.

Another vital step is de-risking features to identify potential pitfalls or challenges early on. Using Agile development is also valuable. Agile installs a safety rail for your feature development. It enables incremental improvements, feedback loops, and adaptability so that your AI prototype evolves efficiently and effectively to meet the desired outcomes.

In all, the process of introducing AI will vary for everyone. Still, by following a systematic framework like the one above, your company can better navigate the complexities of AI implementation. Using a proven framework will ensure a strategic and effective deployment of artificial intelligence technologies for your employees and customers.

Ready to get started on your LLM project?

Learn more about our AI & Data Science practice online, and email us at hello@robotsandpencils.com!

May 1, 2024

Insurance Digital Transformation Challenges and Solutions

Robots & Pencils

5 Challenges Slowing Down Insurance Digital Transformation

As insurance providers modernize and optimize products and experiences, challenges are unavoidable. In this blog, we look at the top issues in digital transformation that insurance companies face and how to overcome them.

1. Paper Problems

Are you switching from paper-based processes to online, automated workflows? If so, it’s crucial to incorporate modern customer and employee expectations into your transition. In other words, don’t just move an analog process to a digital space. First, evaluate your existing paper process. What works? What’s broken? What would be easier for the people involved? Now is the chance to improve your processes. Rebuild them around what customers, employees, or brokers actually want.

UX specialists can provide services and expertise in building system architecture and workflows to support user needs. They can do research and usability tests that help you make strategic choices for your customers and employees. Designing new processes with users at the center will ultimately boost adoption and satisfaction.

2. Too Many Clicks

Dealing with insurance can be tedious. Anyone will admit it. So many tasks are involved. There’s policy selection, data entry, verification, and payment processing, to name just a few. These steps can add up to a ton of clicks and frustrate users. Some users may eventually give up. Customers may even switch providers.

To streamline your workflows and keep customers engaged, analyze your current processes and user journeys. Look for bottlenecks, unnecessary steps, and areas for improvement. There are often multiple places to simplify processes by integrating systems and automating repetitive tasks. With your findings, you can design a more efficient experience. Even something like adding intelligent form autofill can save employees and customers time.

By applying UX design best practices during a digital transformation, insurance companies can create experiences that save everyone time. As a result, work will get done faster, and customers and employees will be happier.

3. Varying Customer Preferences

Creating products that meeting customer preferences is a key part of digital transformation in insurance and elsewhere. However, different customer groups have varying insurance needs and preferences. For instance, younger customers want digital convenience and personalization. On the other hand, older customers value traditional customer service and comprehensive coverage. This variability can pose challenges in product development.

To address these challenges, companies can create products with distinct views and offerings for each customer segment. They can also empower staff to customize products for each customer. Customers and employees should be able to easily personalize insurance packages based on risk profiles, life stages, or preferences.

Having communication options, such as social media, email, chat, phone, and mail, also helps you cater to customer preferences. To get this right, not only should every channel be easily accessible, but all interactions must be tracked and integrated into the digital platform. This connectivity will allow customers to jump seamlessly from one channel to the next. However they want to communicate, everyone should have a personalized and positive experience.

4. Risky Business

Delivering highly personalized experiences starts with data. Yet insurance information is full of sensitive personal and financial data. Cybersecurity is a serious industry concern. Companies must find a way to use this data without increasing risk to the business. Fortunately, there are tried and true methods to ensure strong security, including:

Implementing robust encryption to protect data in transit and at rest
Using intuitive but strict access controls so that only authorized customers and personnel can access sensitive data
Informing customers on how you use and protect data and allowing them to manage preferences
Incorporating controls across channels and interfaces via multi-factor authentication, regular security updates, and secure connections
Educating employees on data protection and confidentiality best practices
Continuously assessing and mitigating data handling and processing risks

5. Outdated Tech and Fragmented Data

Customer experience is a top priority, but your employees matter too. Their needs deserve your attention. Back-end technology and data availability are as essential as the front-end. Employees can’t deliver on the customer satisfaction gains promised by shiny new customer-facing products if your systems are confusing to use or data is locked away in silos.

When planning a digital transformation in your insurance company, consider both internal and external technology. Employee experience and satisfaction (or frustration) directly impact the customer experience. Enhancing and automating internal processes will, in turn, improve external experiences. These processes include underwriting, billing, and other operational activities. Increasing data sharing and speeding up low-value tasks can have big payoffs. System integration and data visibility are vital for making interactions between customers and employees go smoothly.

Let’s Talk Insurance and Digital Transformation!

Want to create more engaging and personalized customer experiences? Ready to grow employee satisfaction and productivity? We can help. Contact us at hello@robotsandpencils.com today.