“If you don’t fail while you’re building stuff, you’re not learning”. Head of IT Business Solutions at Laya Healthcare Blake Rizk has been spearheading the use and development of AI in the organisation, focusing on better customer experience in their adoption of the tech. His key to success in the AI transformation of the company? Failure.
In 2024, Laya Healthcare implemented six generative AI solutions — notably constructed from the outset with EU AI regulation in mind. Pointing out agile strategist Claudio Peroni’s ‘Popcorn Flow’ approach to innovation, Blake says that “it's about finding out what the problem is. What are your options? What experiments can you run? Keep running them until you get to the answer that you want.”
Blake attributes the successful delivery of all six solutions to starting small and experimenting.
“Do small experiments until you know you're heading in the right direction. That's it.” Once the experimental stage is complete, the fundamental next step is choosing the right partner to develop the technology.
“The partner ecosystem is crucial,” Blake advises. “Software partners, infrastructure partners, as you're building your knowledge and your team, they're paramount to success.”
AI technology has been successfully integrated to improve the experience for Laya customers in a variety of ways. “Pretty much anything that we build, we do with the customer in mind. Customer experience is extremely important,” Blake says. AI has been used effectively for tasks such as scanning and auto-filling claims to process them faster, and summarising calls to give staff more time to engage directly with members who need assistance.
“During our busiest season, we have 10,000 to 11,000 calls per week through the call centre. When you look at the hours and how many hours that gives back to the call centre, you're able to take more phone calls, which also means that your wait times are less. That was our goal.”
As in many businesses, initially, the adoption of AI tools caused some apprehension among staff, but providing effective training ensured people understood how it would bring benefits to their workplace. Blake highlights that education plays an important role in the rollout of any new technology, specifically in the realm of AI.
“Education is a key fundamental for our AI Hub,” Blake explains. “Generally, before we deploy something, there's training involved. So they know it's coming and they know how to use it.”
He continues; “No one's lost their jobs, and that's not the point. When it comes to what we do in insurance, it's the human that is the most important. There are things that people can do better than any computer.”
The insurance industry, like many others, runs the risk of falling into the trap of playing things safe and falling behind in the AI revolution. Blake’s advice? Start small, partner right, experiment and don’t be afraid to fail. It’s how we learn, after all.
“Education is a key fundamental… So they know it’s coming and they know how to use it.”
– Blake Rizk, Head of IT Business Solutions at Laya Healthcare