According to TAL, the partnership is aimed at accelerating advanced cloud and AI capabilities through infrastructure and skills investment to support employees in delivering relevant, accessible life insurance and retirement income solutions.
This comes at a time where serious questions about the use of AI in the financial and insurance sectors continue, with one study showing upwards of 56 per cent of Australians still prefer their advice coming from the human being.
On the new partnership, Hinesh Chauhan, chief information officer at TAL, said: “We’re investing in the tech and in building skills that will help our people respond to the next generation needs of Australians.
“Expanding our longstanding partnership with Microsoft means we can significantly scale and speed up our innovation in products and services all underpinned by TAL’s principles for ethical and responsible AI, ensuring a secure operating environment for our customers, partners and people.”
Georgina Croft, chief claims officer, TAL said: “Life insurance is deeply human. Customers contact us during some of the most challenging times of their lives, as they navigate illness, injury or loss.
“Our people are shaping the AI tools that enable them to be fully present with customers and deliver a compassionate high-quality experience.”
Microsoft will co-invest in TAL’s engineering capability as it works to consolidate its data environment on Azure and build out a suite of AI-enabled tools.
According to the life insurer, TAL’s push into AI is already translating into measurable gains for both customers and staff.
This included its chat-based knowledge assistant that it said is delivering faster, more accurate responses to claims consultants by drawing on TAL’s internal knowledge base.
Since launch, the tool has handled more than 37,000 claims-related queries, cutting response times by an average of seven minutes per question and generating 93 per cent positive user feedback. Following its success in claims, the solution has now been rolled out across HR and customer service teams.
It also rolled out an AI-powered post-call summarisation tool integrated into TAL’s core claims system, which automatically transcribes and summarises calls in real time. The capability enables consultants to remain focused on supporting customers during conversations, while reviewing notes afterwards. To date, the tool has processed more than 120,000 claims-related calls.
TAL also highlighted the program will help enhance the AI capabilities across the company.
“AI is intuitive for some, newer for others and we’re focused on closing that gap, giving employees an edge in their careers and ensuring they’re set-up to safely use data and AI to help customers and innovate for the future,” said Chauhan.
“This is about building experiences customers love, and that our people love to build. Our expanded collaboration will also see our engineers working with Microsoft’s engineers and scientists to develop solutions together to deliver impact faster.”
Duncan Taylor, general manager for financial services at Microsoft ANZ, added: “By unifying its data in Azure and weaving AI into the fabric of its operations, TAL is reimagining how an insurer works from the inside out.
“It’s exciting to see them innovating at this scale and we’re proud to support TAL as it sets a new standard for customer focused innovation in life insurance.”
