ChatGPT: The Ins and Outs for Insurance Agents

Keep hearing about ChatGPT and not sure what it is? Let’s talk about what it is, how insurance agents are using it, best practices for using it, and pros, cons and risks.

By now you’ve probably heard the name “ChatGPT.” So, what is it? It’s an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses natural language processing to have human-like conversational dialogue with users. You can ask it questions or have it write various content, such as social media posts, articles, emails and more. The basic version is currently open to the public for free use.

Almost 60% of U.S. and U.K. insurers with more than 100 employees are already using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Below are categorized ways insurance agents have reported using ChatGPT, followed by currently-known best practices, pros and cons and risks and limitations. As with any new technology, ChatGPT is still being studied, evaluated and understood, and that’s important to keep in mind as you explore its capabilities.

5 Ways Insurance Agents are Using ChatGPT

1. Marketing—ask it to help you generate content for social media, emails and more. You can even give it a current piece of content and ask it to make it even better (like write it in a friendlier voice, shorten it so it’s easier to comprehend, etc.).
2. Customer Service—use it to help you create customer service auto-responses, like voicemails, chatbot responses, texts, follow-up emails and more.
3. Data Analysis—it could help you analyze customer data and provide personalized insurance coverage advice, as well as analyze company data to inform business decisions. (But you should also know there could be risks to inputting data—which we’ll touch more on later.)
4. Risk Assessments—try having it examine your customer data to help you identify risk levels and generate recommendations to help them increase their safety.
5. Lead Generation—you could input large data sets of potential clients, have it help you determine which leads are most promising by looking at certain criteria and ask it to create a customized sales pitch for those leads.

5 Best Practices for Using ChatGPT

Though ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it’s not a one-size-fits-all program or replacement for a human marketer. It still requires a human touch to check for accuracy, spelling and grammar, word usage, tone, etc. Below are 5 best practices when using ChatGPT:

1. Review content—for accuracy, relevance, consistency with your brand, and spelling and grammar.
2. Ask for multiple options/solutions—this way you can see which best suits your needs.
3. Make what it produces more creative—AI is not a replacement for human creativity. Be sure to refine the content enough that it still reads like a human, concerned with audience engagement, wrote it.
4. Be specific and detailed in your prompt—tell it what language, tone, keywords, sentence length, sources and/or words to use/not use. For example, “Write a blog about why businesses need insurance” won’t produce as quality a response as “Write a 500-word blog about how businesses could benefit from D&O insurance coverage using a friendly and informative tone.”
5. Ask for sources—so you can cite them accordingly and double-check accuracy.

Pros and Cons

ChatGPT has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to agents using it in the insurance space, here are a few worth considering before you dive-in:

Cons:

• Not always accurate—it scours the internet for information, and could easily return false information (so it requires constant fact-checking). It also doesn’t provide sources, unless asked.
• Currently slightly dated—at the time of this writing, ChatGPT only uses data up until the year 2021 to generate its responses.
• Data privacy and security—you should always consider the possible ramifications of sharing, saving or placing your data anywhere (including ChatGPT, cloud storage and online document sharing) and consider how misuse of any technology could make your agency vulnerable to cyber-attack. For example, should you decide to input customer data into ChatGPT, it collects and stores this information for a period of time. It “will still store new ChatGPT conversations for up to 30 days to ‘monitor for abuse’ before it permanently deletes them.” This makes you vulnerable to data breaches and cyber-attacks.
• Legal concerns—there is uncertainty about who owns the content generated by ChatGPT. Some legal experts, such as Margaret Esquenet of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP, say “’Absent human creative input, a work is not entitled to copyright protection. As a result, the U.S. Copyright Office will not register a work that was created by an autonomous artificial intelligence tool.’” Others suggest that, if the content included “sufficient human authorship,” it can be copyrighted.
• It’s not human—so it doesn’t fully understand the complexity of human language and can’t detect bias.
• It’s technology—From The Terminator to The Matrix, Hollywood has shown us how scary tech could be—and there are currently moral and ethical concerns over the use of ChatGPT, which are still being ironed out.

Pros:

• There are possible solutions to many of the possible cons—For example, while there are still concerns over privacy and the use of the data you input, it seems possible to train it to house data and generate responses based on your data. If you have a coder at your agency, you can check out these instructions for feeding ChatGPT your data.
• It can spark creativity—you can ask it to give you a list of 10 blog ideas or provide five examples of concerns the public have about insurance–then write content from there.
• Save time (and therefore money)—it can help save you time by generating friendly responses and quality content for your customers.
• It’s simple—you don’t need to be tech-savvy to use it! Just talk to it like you’re talking to your assistant—and the more you use it, the more you’ll understand how to navigate it.

To summarize, if you’re an insurance broker, there are plenty of potential pros and benefits to using ChatGPT for your everyday tasks, such as generating email responses and social media content. The program can write marketing content and analyze data to inform your or your customer’s decisions. Though there are significant reasons to use ChatGPT, it’s important to consider the potential cons and negatives and be mindful as you use it. Research suggests you need to be careful with what information you provide ChatGPT and how your employees are using it. It’s also important to cite sources used in the AI-generated content so you’re not subject to plagiarism.

Overall, if you’re using it conscientiously and carefully, ChatGPT can provide massive benefits to insurance agents. Some of the biggest benefits are likely task automation, chatbot replies (which can answer your clients’ most frequently-asked questions) and automatic email replies. On top of having quality content that’s written in your agency’s brand, tone and voice, you’ll be saving time and energy to put towards other tasks, such as generating leads and working with clients.