Drones Have Found a Niche in the Insurance Business

Unmanned aerial vehicles are finding their feet in a whole bunch of applications: agriculture, package delivery, beaming Internet from the sky, you name it. But they’re also proving to be particularly useful to insurers, who are using them to carry out inspections of houses before they pay out claims. The Wall Street Journal reports that many adjusters now send out drones every day to inspect, say, storm damage to the roofs of houses, rather than having to send expensive human inspectors do the job. Liberty Mutual’s vice president of claims innovation, Lily Wray, tells the newspaper that it’s taken “something that takes hours down to minutes.” In fact, the industry appears to be embracing new technologies wholeheartedly: the Journal also describes how AI image recognition software is being used to assess damage in car claims, and some startups are even using chatbots to automate the entire claims procedure.