‘With technology, insurance moving from `repair and replace’ to prevention’

Mark Klein, Chief Digital Officer at Ergo, leads the insurer’s digitalization, marketing and global partnerships. A former telecom and consulting executive, Klein has been with Ergo for nine years. The company, which operates across Europe and Asia in health, life and P&C insurance, recently entered the US market through a $2.6 billion acquisition of digital SME insurer Next. In an interview with Times of India, Klein speaks of how with a goal of becoming the leading digital insurer in its core markets by 2025, Ergo is deploying technologies such as process mining, AI, robotics and phone bots—more than 500 robots and 15,000 daily bot-handled calls—to boost efficiency and customer experience.How does a legacy company become a digital insurer? You’ve said it's more cultural than technological?That is correct. While most technologies can be deployed on top of legacy systems, the real challenge is cultural. Employees must understand what the technology does and doesn't do. We demystify the tools, give staff a stage to share success stories, and celebrate adoption—even naming robots and marking their 'birthdays.' These technologies take care of repetitive tasks, letting employees focus on complex customer needs. It was an evolutionary transformation. We reengineered core processes gradually, focusing on speed and customer centricity.How did the deployment of AI play out?We began with simple machine learning models, like email classification in 2017. That helped us prepare for broader adoption. Now, with large language models, we focus on three areas: adoption management, scaling use cases, and realizing impact. AI must move beyond pilots and deliver real business value. We have over 110 algorithms in production and a five-year plan to scale across Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium, Spain, the UK, and Greece. In Germany, we launched "Ergo GPT," a secure ChatGPT-style tool for employees. About 60% of staff use it daily. We also use gen AI to convert unstructured broker emails into structured data and to make internal product documentation searchable using a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) model.How is process mining helping the company?Process mining offers transparency. It helps identify inefficiencies and manual bottlenecks. It creates you the full transparency of a process because it takes the log files out of your IT systems and with that really shows you the full transparency of your process. How long did it take? Which were the different steps? And you see immediately where you still have a lot of manual work, where you have working times, where your process is not so straight. Sometimes you think oh, it's a very easy process. And then you. But you have many, many permutations of that. And with that you can see how to adjust the process, how to further automate the process that you get with process mining.Is Ergo outsourcing to India?Yes, we have our service hub here, our nearshoring location for Ergo Technology Services India (ETS) in Mumbai. The team is over 600 and growing. ETS supports digital initiatives across the group.With digitisation happening at the same time as genome sequencing and predictive analysis in health and telematic insurance in motor, is insurance now more about managing risk than just calculating probability?Both matter. We're moving from "repair and replace" to prevention. In health, that means encouraging healthier lifestyles. In motor, telematics helps avoid accidents. But prediction and probability will still play a role. We are also preparing for new risks such as Cyber risks, climate-related events, and rising health issues, especially in Western Europe. These require stronger coverage and better response capabilities.With Europe having stronger privacy and data security norms. How do you ensure compliance across geographies?We follow strict governance and comply fully with GDPR. We only use customer data with explicit consent and do not use data scraping for underwriting. For rejections, there is always the concerpt of human-in-the-loop. If a claim is approved straight through, AI can handle it. But rejections always require human oversight.HDFC Ergo has launched `Here’ app which goes beyond insurance and is key interface for customers. Are you looking to replicate it in other markets?We’re exploring that. India’s public digital infrastructure makes such services easier to implement than in Europe.Are you bringing anything new to the Indian JV?Yes. India led our group in adopting robotics in 2016. Now we exchange best practices regularly and benchmark progress across markets with four key performance indicators (KPIs): share of online sales, portal registrations, digital interactions, and availability of online products. Customer experience is the key driver. Ergo is investing over €130 million in GenAI infrastructure over the next five years—this does not including staff or operations— this is purely for tech.