Waterdrop tests a ChatGPT-like application

Chinese insurance company Waterdrop shared that it has (internally) tested a ChatGPT-like application, and will apply it to insurance marketing and services.

“Waterdrop Assistant”, the digital worker launched by Waterdrop in 2022, is designed to help insurance service workers improve working efficiency and precision through intelligent chatbot technology. Now, Waterdrop with its ChatGPT-like application, expects its intelligent chatbot to use text or voice to independently complete simple insurance marketing jobs, such as introducing short-term insurance products and answering customer questions in the process.

“The key to the application of intelligent chatbots to insurance is to train them with massive data.” – Huang Mingxing, who heads Waterdrop’s AI business.

To build intelligent chatbots aligned with insurance demand, the company shares that it must be first trained with “plenty of knowledge about insurance products and dialogues with users in insurance sales, underwriting, claim settlement and other scenarios.” Without data training, even access to advanced algorithms and models like ChatGPT will be useless. 

Bottom Line: ChatGPT-like solutions require proper training to deliver valuable information, and since you learn from the past, not the future, the real ChatGPT can answer questions and carry out requests in text form, based on information from the internet as it was in 2021. In a closed environment, we can see a conversational AI chatbot provide value for employee training in some capacity, but it’s hard to see a compelling use case for consumer-facing applications at this point.