The panel, chaired by Sandeep K. Shukla, director of IIIT Hyderabad, will examine AI’s impact on insurers, policyholders and the broader insurance ecosystem, with a particular focus on ethical adoption, transparency and data security.
Hyderabad:Insurance regulator IRDAI has constituted a seven-member working group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop governance frameworks, best practices and safeguards for the insurance sector, seeking to strike a balance between innovation and policyholder protection.
The panel, chaired by Sandeep K. Shukla, director of IIIT Hyderabad, will examine AI’s impact on insurers, policyholders and the broader insurance ecosystem, with a particular focus on ethical adoption, transparency and data security.
Other members of the group include Nandakumar Saravade, former CEO of ReBIT; Ashutosh Bahuguna, scientist at CERT-In; Manoj Nayak, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of SBI Life Insurance; Shivanath Somanathan, CISO of Star Health & Allied Insurance; and Steve D’Souza, chief risk officer (CRO) of ICICI Lombard General Insurance. Deepak Gaikwad, General Manager and CISO of IRDAI, will serve as the member-convener.
The working group has been tasked with assessing the adoption, maturity and governance of AI systems across regulated entities and conducting a structural assessment of the inventory of AI applications currently in use.
It will also study the implications of frontier AI technologies, recommend security controls to mitigate risks arising from AI-driven automated attacks and examine the need for sector-wide stress tests.
Among its key mandates is the formulation of an AI governance framework to ensure ethical, transparent and explainable use of AI, including in areas such as claims management and fraud detection.
The group will also propose an AI audit framework covering pre-deployment and post-deployment requirements, review global regulatory and supervisory approaches to AI in insurance, and identify skill gaps and capacity-building requirements for various stakeholders.
Highlighting the importance of the initiative, IRDAI said the rapid advancement of AI is creating new ethical, operational and cybersecurity challenges, making robust governance frameworks essential for the insurance industry to harness the technology’s transformative potential responsibly.
It’s indeed a very thoughtful action by IRDAI. Insurance sector, with huge amounts of personal data, transactional data, financial trail should remain free from any vulnerability.So far, to a great extent, insurance sector in India has shielded itself from external threats but with AI inroads, it needs to be a step ahead. I wholeheartedly welcome the forward looking initiative.