Beyond Human Risk: Insuring Commercial Autonomy & Robotics
The adoption of commercial robotics has been increasing over the last 20 years, well before the pandemic. For enterprises, adopting automation of human error-prone processes is a no-brainer: higher safety and better productivity. There has been a proliferation of warehouse automation, automated agricultural machinery, autonomous mining solutions, and commercial drones. For example, here is some data on the shipments of industrial robotics from the last two decades:
In the middle of the previous decade, on-road autonomy came to the spotlight, becoming a very promising commercial robotics application. As sensors get better, computing costs fall exponentially, and machine learning advances, autonomous mobility is on the verge of imminent commercialization and scale. The benefits of on-road autonomy far outweigh its costs:
- reduced traffic fatalities;
- economical and reliable options to substitute personal vehicle ownership; and
- a myriad of opportunities to build products and services on top of the autonomous vehicle real estate (e.g. in-vehicle entertainment, data applications).
With a shift from human-centric to machine-centric risks, insurance is in a prime position to ingest new types of data for risk assessment, going beyond standard data fields and into the technical assessment of robotics systems. Claims can only tell a part of a client’s risk story. From safety assessment and performance metrics to trip reports and sensor logs, insurance carriers have to go into the uncharted territory of data sharing with clients that have a lot of such data. Especially, that data comes from non-human, software-defined operations for the most part.
The ability to collect, analyze, and apply robotics data to insurance is at the core of providing machine-centric coverage at scale. That data will enable insurers to clearly separate human-centric risk distributions from machine-centric ones. In turn, that will open doors to many insurance products, with autonomy-specific coverage forms and adequate ratings. Whoever solves the data sharing will win the autonomy insurance race. At Koop, we are working on exactly that.
Data sharing is at the core of our insurance solution. Our clients not only have access to the proprietary tools that make their insurance experience streamlined yet comprehensive but also can easily share data in return for better insurance policies. Koop’s vision is to make insurance a data application for commercial autonomy and robotics through traditional and embedded models. To learn more, please get in touch or visit our website!
