Insurers tap AI for enhanced customer experience

Nigeria’s insurance industry is looking to explore artificial intelligence (AI) in revolutionising the way it interacts with customers.

By integrating AI technologies, experts in the industry specialising on information technology are seeing its activities help increase market satisfaction and penetration.

These were some takeaways at the recently concluded 13th annual Nigerian Insurers Association (NIA) Chief Information Officer (CIO) Conference for 2025 held in Lagos.

Jackson Ikiebe, chairman of the CIO speaking on the theme: ‘AI-Driven Transformation in Insurance: Elevating Customers Experience’ said artificial intelligence has come to assist and transform human activities, stating that presently everything is tending towards artificial intelligence and everybody wants to embrace and leverage it to enhance their activities.

He said artificial intelligence would definitely help insurance practitioners to optimize the number of things they are currently doing and also in their offering to customers.

While noting that AI adoption in this part of the world is at infancy, he stated that automating processes with this technology could reduce operational costs, making insurance products more affordable.

“When artificial intelligence is fully entrenched, we would have a better industry that is responsive to customer’s needs,” he said.

He submitted that because there are many benefits that are derived from it, insurance industry can’t run away from it. “We don’t want to stay behind, but stay ahead and adapt things that are relevant to our own environment that would help us to reduce the challenges we are having in terms of our processing time.”

We should be able to respond to our customers, who need better experience of our processes and more benefits from us. We cannot afford to delay them in achieving their expectations, he said.

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Dimeji Ogundele, vice chairman, NIA IOC during a panel session he moderated aggregated submissions from experts in the IT industry and came to a conclusion, that localisation of the industry’s artificial intelligence with efficient data mining will revolutionise the sector for better customer experience.

They also canvassed the need for robust collaboration between insurance regulators and practitioners in the deployment and usage of artificial insurance.

Insurance companies were implored to invest more in research and development to create artificial intelligence that would align with their objectives and regulations.

They also canvassed the need for robust collaboration between insurance regulators and practitioners in the deployment and usage of AI.

On building centralised data in the insurance industry, Ikiebe had also noted that the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database (NIID) platform has helped to centralise data in the industry, stressing that the platform has helped the industry to have a handshake with security agencies in enforcing compliance.

He noted the industry has started the process of harmonising data, even as though the initial challenge of trust, which hindered the harmonisation of data in the past is gradually being tackled.