Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#51

Post by larrik »

almost wrote: post #6

LLMs are really good when your primary goal is just to fob people off. So customer support when you don't care about your customers etc. I can imagine it's very appealing when you just want to come up with semi-plausable reasons to deny insurance claims. Who cares if it's wrong? They might give up anyway and you've saved paying out! Not saying they're not good for other things, but the "waste people's time and make t…

Believe it or not, that's not even the topic of the article.

The article is entirely about the AI doing the first pass of the claim intake and causing a lot more work for everyone involved instead. Mis-routing, mis-categorization, hallucinating details, etc.

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#52

Post by dspillett »

nvahalik wrote: post #32
dash2 wrote: post #3

> Between May 2025 and May 2026, employment in the sector dropped a staggering 21 percent, according to BLS data. Yeah sure. I mean, same reason why HN readers hate AI, right? It replaces their jobs. (Obviously the difference is that the poor old claims adjusters didn't spend the last two decades "disrupting" every other industry and telling everyone else to "learn to code". Ha! If you hear a faint high noise, that's…

AI isn’t replacing adjusters. Anecdotally, many of them are aging out and the demands of adjusters are increasing while the pay hasn’t necessarily gone up. While technically you don’t have to know the ins and outs of construction, it helps a lot and there are just not a lot of people who have that knowledge. And if they do, they often go into construction themselves or sell roofs. Both of which can be far more lucrat…

> AI isn’t replacing adjusters.

> Anecdotally, many of them are aging out

Ageing and out and neither being replaced directly or reduce numbers coming in at the bottom/mid as others move up, is still a drop in people. If part of the reason there is less need to bring people in lower down is that a few are being expected to do the work of a few more due to automation via AI, then that is AI replacing them, just not quite as directly as “we need less people as AI makes each more efficient so there are redundancies”.

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#53

Post by fluoridation »

antasvara wrote: post #49
glimshe wrote: post #5

Ultimately this isn't "AI's fault". As the article points out, clueless executives who don't understand the capabilities and limitations of specific LLMs push the technology on workers so they can say they are "using AI to improve efficiency".

I don't know, it feels like "reading a claims summary and classifying the type of claim" should be the bread and butter LLM use case? Not that executives are blameless for pushing AI everywhere, but we should also be able to "blame" AI for doing poorly at a task it's supposed to be good at.

[flagged]

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#54

Post by colechristensen »

Gigachad wrote: post #45
cm2187 wrote: post #42

Meanwhile insurance fraudsters love AI, and its ability to manipulate photos!

It seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies. It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.

I knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody.

Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#55

Post by andrei_says_ »

Aerolfos wrote: post #26
Grombobulous wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsof…

> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud. Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global... It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it

Wow, what a post.

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#56

Post by watwut »

hilariously wrote: post #15
Grombobulous wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities? As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsof…

You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid. Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.

I think that we need to start blaming vendors for blatant lies. Systematically, again amd again. And actually punish them.

Somehow the "accountability" shifted from meaning "being reaponsible for not defrauding, lying" into "it is fault of people who were lied to".

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#57

Post by jordanb »

colechristensen wrote: post #54
Gigachad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies. It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.

I knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody. Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.

The thing is this was the pitch for buying clothes online: worried it won't fit? Just return it. No questions asked! We'll even pay return shipping!

It's interesting how companies are now redefining things they explicitly encouraged their customers to do as "abuse."

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#58

Post by [deleted] »

colechristensen wrote: post #54
Gigachad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies. It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.

I knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody. Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.

[deleted]

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#59

Post by axus »

vintermann wrote: post #9
tonyhart7 wrote: post #4

So AI is going to take jobs not because AI is necessarily better or more appropriate, but because it accelerates bad decision making and makes those decisions exponentially worse.

Well, more because it pulverizes personal responsibility for bad decisions ("I didn't deny your claim, the computer did"). But yeah.

When you remove decision-making, there is still responsibility for negligence

Re: You Know Who Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters

#60

Post by WarmWash »

colechristensen wrote: post #54
Gigachad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies. It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.

I knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody. Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.

It's even worse than that, because they are adamant that they aren't abusing the system, and insist that if they didn't want people doing it, they would stop taking returns.
Post reply on HN