Human in, on or out: How AI is reshaping insurance jobs, says Axis Max Life COO Manu Lavanya

India’s insurance industry, the youngest in the world in terms of median age, is at a unique inflection point. The 600-odd million citizens between the ages of 18 and 35 have different requirements — from more personalised products that cater to their lifestyle-based needs to tech-savvy interfaces that reduce processing and claims timelines.

Add to this the all-pervasive nature of artificial intelligence (AI), and we are looking at a rapidly evolving sector, adding new layers of challenges for insurers and their workforce alike.

Manu Lavanya, chief operations officer (COO), Axis Max Life Insurance, believes a three-zone operating model comprising humans in the loop, on the loop and out of the loop could soon become the taxonomy for redistributing human judgement across the value chain.


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Explaining the difference between the three, he said, “In the human in the loop... it is a human being that says okay, I'm going to approve it... so a human pushes the last button. Second is human on the loop, where a human being does not even push the last button, but there will be certain exceptions... And then there are things like underwriting [Straight-Through Processing], where the human is completely out of the loop.”

With these three, the nature of work and workforce at insurance companies are also getting a facelift as the line between business and AI increasingly disappears — something Lavanya agrees with.

“My organisation structure is changing. The roles are changing. The purpose of the roles is changing, the job descriptions of existing roles are changing... In fact, just to give you a perspective, my head of operations now is also my chief digital officer... Business and AI are not separate. Business will become AI. AI will become a part of the business,” he told The Economic Times Digital.

The shift is already beginning to reshape how insurance firms, legacy and new-age, structure their workforce and integrate AI into everyday operations.

AI is changing the insurance workforce

A PwC report released in July suggests that the Indian insurance sector is past the point where distribution scale decides winners. With penetration stalled at 3.7% and the customer’s primary relationship often owned by the distributor, the report contends that the next advantage lies in a “relationship operating system”.

This translates into an AI-native architecture that keeps the “human in the loop” and converts every lifecycle interaction into compounding trust. But if AI is the core layer of this architecture at scale, the question is: what happens to the people, roles and skills that run the engine?

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The answer, at least for Lavanya, is not necessarily to build a workforce of AI specialists, but to make AI learnability a core skill across the organisation.

“I am not hiring for AI experts, but it's a question of learnability... What I call AI and digital learnability has now become mandatory in the skill set that I hire for,” Lavanya said.

AI’s trust test

Insurance is a trust-based sector where the firm promises a customer to pay them at a later date when a calamity hits them. As things get automated and handed over to AI agents, trust is the first thing that comes into question.

Lavanya takes a contrarian view and suggests that the biggest potential break in trust due to AI could also become its biggest opportunity to strengthen trust.

“All hinges on one word, which is explainability of an AI decision. Trust gets broken when you promise something and then you don't do it... because the process is messed up, because some human being made a mistake, somebody applied a judgment that was incorrect, somebody used a wrong rate... With automation and decisioning — which AI does — those infractions will be few and far between,” he said.

The same shift is playing out on the sales side. Lavanya added that AI and Gen AI are aids and enablers for the seller of tomorrow to become a “bionic salesforce”.

He added: “So, to get extraordinary outcomes out of ordinary salespeople… is the role of AI and gen AI is in our game. For instance, before meeting this profile customer, make sure you [agent] cover these five points. Or, this customer last time reached out for these three reasons for servicing... here is how you can pitch, here is what the competition is doing. All this is implemented at scale, today.”