(Yicai) Sept. 25 -- China Pacific Insurance and other Chinese insurers are starting to embrace virtual employees in the form of artificial intelligence-driven large language models to work alongside real staff and improve productivity.

CPIC is bringing out tradeable digitized labor in the insurance sector, Vice President Yu Bin said at its “science and technology open day” on Sept. 21.

CPIC has developed a ‘virtual employee’ that is being tried out in three posts, namely as a pre-auditing inspector, as an auditing assistant and as a post-audit manager of the insurer’s auditing department, said Chen Feng, assistant general manager at the insurer’s tech unit CPIC Technology.

The virtual staff members help solve the problem of a dearth of auditors and expand the scope of auditing, he added. In future, more digital employees will be introduced in other company posts, he added.

AI has strengths in three key areas, namely computing power, algorithms and data, and data is the area with the most commercial potential, Wei Chenyang, associate dean of the Institute for Fintech Research of Tsinghua University and director of the China Insurance and Pension Research Center, told Yicai. The insurance sector has a huge amount of data and many potential application scenarios for LLMs.

The use of LLMs in the insurance sector will play a supportive role and the aim is not for them to replace people, Wei said.

Other Chinese insurers such as Sunshine Insurance Group and Zhong An have also begun to apply more LLMs, while fintech giant Ant Group and search engine titan Baidu are linking arms with financial institutions and rolling out LLMs for the financial sector.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor