Insurers are often dealing with complicated customer processes (sometimes in the wake of catastrophic events), so adding AI and automation to behind-the-scenes support can save precious time.

Customer experience automation firm Ushur just raised $50 million, including from the Aflac’s venture arm, for its customer experience platform that targets highly regulated industries like insurance and banking.  

Its platform goes beyond robotic process automation (RPA) and other legacy approaches that are too brittle for customer engagement: This kind of tech is “fine for automating rote back-office jobs, but it’s too brittle for more nuanced tasks, especially anything that involves human interaction,” Ushur’s chief marketing officer, Kashif Mahbub, told Insights Distilled.  

Instead, the platform uses conversational AI and document understanding to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences, it says. 

The firm boasts that it can improve customer engagement rates by as much as 85%, reduce email triage times from five days down to five minutes, and slash issue-resolution times by as much as 90%. It counts Aetna, Aflac, Tower Insurance, Irish Life, United Healthcare, and other Fortune 500 companies among its customers.