With billions of dollars already being poured into AI technology and no signs of investments tapering off anytime soon, the voices expressing concern that the boom is heading toward a bubble have gotten louder.
But as the tech industry continues its ambitious aim to reshape industries across nearly every sector, fundamental questions have also been raised about its impact on the future of employment for humans.
"Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the United States," Jim Farley, CEO of Ford (F), said in June.
The more optimistic view of artificial intelligence is that it will be used to handle repetitive tasks, freeing up humans to focus on more complex, creative and strategic work.
This appears to be the view of the French insurance company Apivia Courtage, which has been partnering with SoundHound AI (SOUN) since 2023.
The voice and conversational AI startup has been providing the insurer with tools to handle customer calls related to medical reimbursement and insurance guarantee levels.
According to SoundHound, these AI solutions have allowed the insurance company’s “human teams” to focus more on working with brokers and clients, while claiming that it has already driven a 20% increase in productivity across Apivia Courtage’s contact center
Going all-in on AI
But now Apivia Courtage is going a step further and will begin utilizing SoundHound’s Amelia 7 AI agent platform, which the latter calls “one of the first truly agentic AI platforms on the market.”
With this new deployment, AI agents will be taking over more of the work.
The insurer will be able to “handle inbound customer queries with fleets of AI agents that can reason, act, and perform complex tasks based on multiple intents,” making it unnecessary for “human agents” to handle any of the queries.
Apivia Courtage, which is part of AEMA Group, one of the world’s largest mutual and cooperative insurers, is currently using the Amelia 7 agent platform as a pilot program.
SoundHound’s stock gained 8.6% on news of its expanded partnership with Apivia Courtage and has surged 27.3% over the past month.
The Amelia platform is powered by large language models (LLMs) and the insurer used “strict benchmarks” in order to test it and ensure that it was ready for client-facing tasks, according to SoundHound.
Emmanuelle Nguyen, CEO of Apivia Courtage, said in a statement that Amelia gives it “a multi-service platform to ensure our clients have seamless and innovative experiences,” while also “empowering our teams to focus on their expertise and create added value.”
The insurance industry has long been seen as one of the slowest sectors within financial services to embrace fintech innovations – and the adoption of AI could also be happening at a slower pace as well.
However, Apivia Courtage is showing that it’s going all-in on deploying artificial intelligence.
Gérald Audenis, head of European operations at SoundHound, said in a statement that Apivia Courtage’s integration of Amelia 7 into its business is putting it at “the leading edge of AI for customer service.”
“The insurance industry as a whole really stands to benefit from this wave of innovation and platforms like Amelia 7 that drive value for businesses while delivering a faster, more efficient service to their customers,” Audenis added.
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