GFT and Databricks democratize AI for insurers and financial institutions across North America

New York, NY (December 12, 2024) – Insurers and financial service organizations across North America are under increasing pressure to integrate AI into their operations in order to drive new efficiencies both internally and for their customers. In fact, 80% of insurers are either planning to adopt AI or have already begun doing so. Despite this appetite for mass adoption, a majority of insurers (69%) and financial institutions have yet to see meaningful results from their AI initiatives, citing inaccuracies and biases in the technology. These challenges can be linked to one foundational problem: disparate data.

It’s against this backdrop that Databricks, the data and AI company, and GFT, a global digital transformation company, are teaming up to provide both the data architecture and the data analytics processes that insurers, banks, credit unions and capital markets firms need to lay the groundwork for successful AI implementations. Their initial work together draws on GFT’s 13 year history in the Canadian insurance space to equip one of the country’s top ten insurers with the data infrastructure to develop new business intelligence applications.  

For the majority of banks and insurers, organizational data is siloed by business sector, creating gatekeepers that prevent AI applications from accessing the data needed to power new efficiencies organization-wide. Some organizations have attempted to break down these siloes by pooling all of their data together in data ‘lakes’. Databricks Data Intelligence Platform’ ‘lakehouse’ model takes this a step further by not only consolidating organizational data, but structuring it within a platform that AI use cases can be easily built on top of. With this increased accessibility, GFT can then build the workflows and frameworks that companies need to ingest their data and use it to train advanced AI models to power dynamic, real-time insights. 

“It’s no longer enough for financial institutions to offer generic, surface-level AI capabilities,” said Andre Gagne, CEO of GFT Canada. “In order to align with customers’ demand for personalized experiences—from hyper-specific claims monitoring, to real-time fraud detection—insurers and banks need AI to be their right-hand-man, instead of a background helper. But doing so first requires accessible, structured data.”

GFT and Databricks’ initial client, a multi-line Canadian insurer offering auto, home, life, farm, travel and commercial insurance as well as investments, needed a structured data environment to leverage new business intelligence tools across all of these departments. GFT and Databricks organized the data from each of these categories, as well as sub-categories including policy management, billing, claims and more, into a single, Microsoft Azure-powered infrastructure. From there, with gatekeepers expelled and various departmental silos broken down, the insurer can leverage AI to power real-time data analytics and insights. 

Through their continued work together, GFT and Databricks will scale their partnership across the larger North American market as they develop custom data infrastructures for organizations based on their individual industry and business needs. In doing so, they’ll lay the foundation for financial institutions to introduce never-before-seen AI capabilities that not only match, but surpass, their competitors.