AI and machine learning start-ups are some of the most exciting and interesting businesses out there today. They are curing diseases, trading trillions of pounds of stock, and making sure your home assistant can understand what you want when you say “OK Google”.

This article will look at how Open Data and Government data is being used to build new AI products and services to optimise business processes.

What is Open Data?

“Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.” 

The full Open Data Definition gives precise details as to what this means.

Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.

Re-use and Redistribution: the data must be provided under terms that permit re-use and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets.

Universal Participation: everyone must be able to use, re-use and redistribute – there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.

At Doorda we work with AI startups, powering their AI models with the structured data they need to make them work. Specifically, we work with a lot of InsurTech and Fintech companies who need data about commercial property and geodemographic data to improve insurance quotes and risk models.

Whether it’s a single powerful open data point being added to a machine-learned model or feeding an algorithm with an entire country worth of government data, we’ve seen Open Data transform business.

How AI + Open Data = Commercial Insurance Success

Commercial business insurance relies upon two major things (among others) when it comes to selling the right products to the right customer.

• Streamlining the quote process to maximise conversion rates
• Understanding everything you can about a prospect to accurately predict risk.

Read on to see how AI and Open Data helps both. 

How AI Helps Predict Insurance Risk

Simply put, risk management is all about using the data available about a business to predict how likely the prospect is to make a claim, and the better and fresher the data you have, the better your prediction will be.

A long time ago this might be done with historical data and gut feel, but now modern insurers use AI to try and find the correlations and relationships between millions of historical data points, they use this to help predict the likely cost of insuring a particular business with greatly increased accuracy.

A human would never be able to open, read, and analyze the millions of data points needed to learn what risk factors correlate with known outcomes, but that’s what AI was born to do; to machine learn exactly which factors and data points predict risk most accurately.

That’s why we get so excited every time we launch a new dataset at Doorda. Every time we extend the data available for AI training models to learn from, we see the real-world improvements in risk assessments that help insurers and their customers get a better result.

How Open Data Helps Streamline the Quote Process

Customers HATE repetitively filling out forms and answering long-winded sets of questions, so the fewer questions insurers ask customers the more money they make… which is where AI and linked open data comes to the rescue again, providing the data that lets companies ask less about customers but know more.

Doorda uses AI to match and link data points from over 2000 data sources, to create larges datasets of linked data about businesses, geo-demographics and individual property, so that insurers and other companies can automatically lookup as much information as possible rather than having to ask it from their customers, reducing the need on them to answer accurately remembering things like the date they registered their company or the addresses of their trading locations.

Summary

AI and Open Data helps commercial insurers by

1. Giving AI models more accurate and fresher data to more accurately predict risk.
2. Reducing the numbers of questions insurers need to ask, while simultaneously increasing the amount you know about a customer.
3. Opening up the ability to complete risk analysis during the application process.

If you run an insurance business or other company that needs a more accurate, fresher picture of your customers, you should consider Doorda’s data products to enrich and power your processes with highly accurate and fresh data today.