Major Australian health insurance provider HBF has announced the launch of its first generative AI agent, which will provide members with conversational search options.
Speaking at Salesforce’s Finance Summit in Sydney last week, the health insurer’s chief information and transformation officer, Sanjeev Gupta, announced that the agent will be launched very soon, marking the first time that HBF has used externally facing AI.
While the conversations with the AI will be limited to general questions and information, Gupta said the agent will soon have the ability to provide a more catered and personal experience, with greater interaction with members.
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“They will first be able to do what we call ‘unauthenticated conversation’ with our AgentForce, asking questions about product policy and things like that, but unauthenticated means that it’s just generic,” he said, as seen by ITNews.
“The next phase that we’re going live with, in a couple of months’ time, is where [the AI] will know who you are and will actually be able to do things for you as a member, like change my current details, change my address or give me information about my claims.
“That’s where the richness starts and [then] extends that to voice and so forth,” Gupta said.
David Beer, HBF’s Member Connect general manager, said that the insurance provider was expecting to develop more agentic AI tools.
“At the moment, we’re using these chat agents, and it’s generative. It’s really helpful at surfacing, but I think for us at the organisation, what we’re looking to is how we are going to really power and remove some of that low-value task, using agents autonomously working end-to-end in Salesforce,” he said.
Already, HBF is using AI within its workforce, having rolled out a generative AI agent to its customer service teams only last year. The pilot that began in December involved 30 staff, but has now expanded to all 200 of its customer service team. The result is an 8 per cent decrease in call handling times.
“That doesn’t sound huge on one hand, but when you think that an average call is around 17 minutes, it’s quite measurable,” Beer said, adding that hold times were reduced by 30 per cent.
Initial testing resulted in slow query responses, but with further investment, it was able to secure faster speeds.
“I think in hindsight we probably played it too safe on the quality side. What that actually meant was [that] the speed just wasn’t quick enough to our front line, so we heard very quickly and very loudly from our working group,” Beer said.
“We did compromise some level of cost in order to get that speed, but we felt that was a really fair commercial trade-off considering we’re seeing a 30 per cent reduction in that whole [handling] time.”
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Daniel Croft
Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Daniel Croft is a passionate journalist with an understanding for and experience writing in the technology space. Having studied at Macquarie University, he joined Momentum Media in 2022, writing across a number of publications including Australian Aviation, Cyber Security Connect and Defence Connect. Outside of writing, Daniel has a keen interest in music, and spends his time playing in bands around Sydney.