The Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, are turning the future into a reality with plans to replace 34 human employees with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Starting the changes in January 2017, the insurance company is making over 30 employees redundant and replacing them with to IBM Watson Explorer, a cognitive search and content analysis platform, using machine learning and language processing to analyse data for trends and patterns.
Whilst this might be a frightening prospect for employees, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance are confident in the investment. IBM Watson Explorer will increase productivity by 30% and see a return on its investment in less than two years.
IBM’s Watson Explorer, which uses “cognitive technology that can think like a human”, enabling it to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video”, will save the company save about 140m yen (£1m) a year after the 200m yen (£1.4m).
According to the press release, Fukoku Life will use IBM Watson Explorer to “classify and categorise diseases, injuries and surgical procedures. When insurance policy holders call the company’s hotline to make an insurance claim, the IBM Watson supercomputer is able to analyse the customer’s voice and detect keywords.”
The rise of such software hasn’t gone without its problems. Last year, a team of researchers abandoned an attempt to develop robots intelligent enough to pass the entrance exam for Tokyo University.
“AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum,” Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics.
This failure in technology is perhaps good news for Japanese employees who saw the recent report by Nomura Research Institute, which concluded that nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be performed by robots by 2035.