Computers in the Workplace

Fun fact – my favorite word is ubiquitous.  Today I’ll get to use it and I’m excited!

In the insurance industry, computers are ubiquitous.  Everything needs to be done on a timeframe that faster technology makes possible.  Speed is the name of game in claim processing, and technology allows for this to be both fast and mobile.  Data needs to be used in forecasting and assessing risk for underwriting, and there’s a good deal of querying involved in financial reporting.  Then there’s the customer experience.  How convenient and user-friendly is the website?  The mobile app?  What story can user data tell in order to make improvements?

Working in finance, I have seen quite a bit of change over the last 15 years.  From mainframe systems that printed reports, to web-based reader-friendly interfaces that were more intuitive and allowed most of the work to stay online.  The reduction in paper made the office space different, with fewer rooms and walls of file cabinets needed, and records being retained electronically instead.  Of course, these updates required upgrades to hardware to maintain - faster processors, larger drives, more RAM.  And then the shift from desktop computers to laptops, swift system upgrades to allow work from home, and a transition to cloud services.

There is already an ever-increasing amount of automation, and in the next 10 years, we’ll see more, especially with AI.  AI could be leveraged to do a lot of the jobs done by people.  There’s an ongoing effort to make digital assistants with voice recognition that’s intuitive enough to feel like you’re speaking with another person.  Along with being used in chats, this could be a big part of the customer support experience on a much larger scale.  We will see advancement in the complexity of decision-making AI can do as well, which will shift a lot of the desired employee skillsets from doing the work to maintaining the tech doing the work.  It’s a trend we’re already seeing, but AI is very expensive to implement, between the cost of the hardware to support it, and training/hiring a qualified workforce to maintain it.  As it becomes more cost-effective, I think we’ll see huge leaps in the use of AI very quickly.

With all of that being said, it is essential for employees in this environment to be computer literate.  With all of the computer use and the advancements made, it’s necessary to have at least a basic understanding of how to use the different systems you’ll work with, how to do basic troubleshooting if something doesn’t work right, how to leverage technology for efficiencies and process improvements, and how to keep information secure.  These are all basic everyday work tasks in a field where computers have become ubiquitous.

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