🗂 Geico Walks with Watson on AI Journey

Replacing human agents with AI, matching it to the right sales workflow:

“So we watched how this was going very closely,” he said. “We’d review transcripts from the early customer interactions, verbatim transcripts, to see how people are reacting in a conversation with Watson – because they didn’t know it was Watson.”

Kalinsky found reassurance in particular from a Watson-customer conversation that occurred one night at about 2 a.m., in which Watson closed a sale, then thanked the customer and asked if there was anything else the customer needed.

The customer replied, “‘No, thank you, you’ve been wonderful, I appreciate it. You know, we late night workers have to stick together.’”

That customers were not put off by (or know they were) interacting with Watson was a positive step. But Kalinsky and his team also found that using Watson with auto insurance customers wasn’t getting the sales traction they wanted. “We did no harm, but we couldn’t get the improvement we were holding ourselves accountable for. So we said, ‘maybe this application is just a little too structured to really feel the benefit.’”

So they re-directed Watson at selling renter’s insurance: “We were able to reconfigure it because it was a slightly less complicated application…in a way that we eliminated some of the traditional flow in the application, but then we mitigated the disruption to a customer who didn’t know what to expect next by layering in Watson. Bottom line: we achieved a 40 percent increase in our closure rate on those policies, it was a tremendous success.” www.enterprisetech.com/2019/02/2…