When COVID-19 first struck, insurance companies around the world had to scramble to figure out their exposure to the systemic socio-economic event. No one had a clear idea about the impact of the pandemic, and so the first problem they had to solve was to work out how many contracts in their portfolios could potentially pay out for pandemic-related claims.
To deal with this, some insurers created COVID taskforces, who were asked to read their entire set of policies and find out if there were explicit exclusions related to pandemic, communicable disease, or virus. For humans, such a task is cumbersome and prone to error; but for technology – specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing – such a task is a breeze.