Forecasting Emerging Technology Trends in the Insurance Industry With Artificial Intelligence

This work focuses on forecasting emerging technology trends in the insurance industry with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). In comparison to similar industries, the digital transformation of the insurance industry is progressing slowly. Traditional insurance organizations are struggling to gain an overview over emerging technologies to be used in their respective transformation journeys. New digital players such as Fresh, which has been successfully selling flat rate insurance offerings via WhatsApp in the German insurance market since 2021 are acting as first movers when it comes to emerging insurance technologies and are increasingly becoming a threat in the insurance market. Forecasting emerging technology trends can support traditional insurers in mitigating this threat. This work seeks to answer how artificial intelligence solutions can help insurers gain a competitive advantage and how beneficial it will be to substitute the proposed approach for conventional forecasting techniques. In this context, a topic clustering text mining algorithm based on patent and scientific journal publications is applied to detect emerging technology trends. This method identified sustainability and blockchain technology as emerging technology trends in the insurance industry. It furthermore partially outperformed industry expert opinions on the future insurance technologies. The proposed approach should be used as an additional tool to quick start the research and development process in the insurance industry instead of being substituted for forecasting methods used today