Irish Life is one of Ireland’s leading financial services organisations, providing pensions, investments, life insurance and health insurance to individuals and businesses across Ireland.
As part of Great-West Lifeco, Irish Life also acts as an AI lighthouse for Canada Life’s European businesses. Capabilities are developed and proven in Ireland, but with the ambition to be subsequently leveraged and deployed in the UK and Germany. This gives us an opportunity to combine local innovation with the scale and shared learning of a major international financial services group.
Our approach to AI focuses on where the technology can create meaningful value for customers, employees and the business. CARA Income Protection demonstrates how this can work in practice.
The challenge: putting expertise to better use
Income Protection claims are complex, expert-led and highly consequential. Assessors must bring together policy information, medical evidence and extensive case histories to determine the appropriate next action for a customer who may be experiencing serious illness or an extended absence from work.
Traditionally, much of that expertise was surrounded by manual work. Assessors read and transcribed documents, searched backfiles for critical information, reconstructed claim histories, prioritised cases and drafted communications before applying their specialist medical and claims expertise.
The opportunity was not simply to automate this process, but to ask how AI could help our people apply their expertise more effectively.
How we innovated: from medical reasoning to Socratic AI
CARA was not developed as a single large AI implementation. Irish Life built the capability progressively.
We initially applied AI to more defined claims processes, including Limited Death and Serious Illness, developing our ability to interpret medical and policy information and support claims assessment. Each deployment created reusable technology, knowledge and experience.
Income Protection represented a significant next step. Cases are more complex, develop over time and frequently require judgement about what should happen next.
CARA now brings information from across a claim into a searchable case view, creates timelines and summaries, helps prioritise cases according to their circumstances and supports customer communications.
More significantly, we have evolved a Socratic AI approach. Rather than asking AI simply to produce “the right answer”, CARA is designed to question and challenge the assessor: exploring the evidence, testing assumptions and considering possible next actions. The objective is to not to produce the right answer, but help an experienced assessor reach a better answer, with the assessor retaining responsibility for the decision.
The benefits: value across the system
The benefits extend well beyond productivity.
For customers, faster communications and better-informed interactions can provide greater support at particularly vulnerable moments. For employees, less time is spent searching, transcribing and administering information, allowing more time for valuable medical and analytical work.
For partners, faster and clearer processing means less time chasing information and a better customer experience. For Irish Life, increased capacity, improved claims outcomes and shorter claim lifecycles create meaningful financial value and support growth without equivalent growth in headcount.
Greater consistency and clearer reasoning also support risk management and regulatory oversight. More broadly, efficient and trusted claims processing helps reinforce confidence in insurance and its role in providing financial security when people lose income.
From an Irish solution to European capability
CARA sits within a broader Irish Life AI strategy spanning Individual, Teams and Enterprise: building AI literacy across our workforce; enabling teams to apply AI to everyday opportunities; and redesigning significant customer and business processes around AI.
Increasingly, our ambition is to turn successful solutions into reusable capabilities. Ireland provides the environment in which these capabilities can be developed and proven before learning, technology patterns and solutions are shared with our Canada Life businesses in the UK and Germany.
It is a practical example of how innovation developed in one European market can create capability that is transferable across borders.
A European opportunity — and the importance of regulatory clarity
Our experience gives us confidence that Europe can be globally competitive in applied AI. European businesses possess deep sector expertise, trusted customer relationships, valuable proprietary knowledge and considerable experience operating in regulated environments.
Clear and timely regulation can be an enabler of that innovation.
For businesses making investment decisions, specific guidance on how the EU AI Act applies to real use cases is particularly valuable. The distinction between AI used for risk assessment and pricing in life and health insurance — identified as high-risk under the Act — and AI used in claims management is a good example.
Recent European Commission guidance clarifying that claims-management applications can sit outside that high-risk insurance classification provides businesses with greater confidence to innovate while continuing to apply appropriate governance, security, data protection and human oversight.
That combination — innovation, responsible deployment and regulatory clarity — can help Europe turn its considerable knowledge and expertise into competitive advantage.