Growing interest in ‘digital twins’ presents huge opportunities for loss prevention, mitigation, and training, according to Maxime Ambourg, AXA XL’s Risk Consulting Head of APAC & Europe.
Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting and burgeoning area of digital technology development. And it’s not all about virtual gaming. Virtual twins – virtual recreations of products and environments - are now widely used to design cars, maintain aircraft, develop lifesaving medical treatments and create greener cities and infrastructure.
According to Mckinsey, the Metaverse – a VR iteration of the internet – could be worth $5trn by 2030, with a wide range of applications across manufacturing, hospitality, entertainment, education, retail, healthcare and financial services.
We see more and more of our clients creating virtual or digital twins of their products, production processes and supply chains, as they look to test and optimise processes, build resilience, collaborate and educate, in a safe virtual environment. Understandably, they are now looking to insurers to leverage virtual reality for risk and insurance services.
Insurance applications
The potential insurance and risk applications of virtual twins are immense. There is huge value in the ability to model complex industrial sites, manufacturing plants, products and supply chains. It creates opportunities for companies and their risk partners to visualise and experience risk scenarios – such as a flood or fire – and explore the effectiveness of potential loss prevention and mitigation actions.
AXA XL has been building a VR platform that, alongside virtual twins, could be applied to a wide range of risk and insurance use cases. The technology has exciting potential for risk engineering, claims and underwriting, and we have already begun to integrate virtual twins into our expanding training offering for clients, enhancing our portfolio of risk-related training, which includes AXA Climate School.
Augmented risk training
AXA XL developed a VR training platform, complete with a comprehensive range of risk- and insurance-specific VR training experiences. We plan to create VR training content for a wide range of key property and casualty risks where mitigation has been shown to be effective, such as use of sprinkler systems, fire and flood mitigation, maintenance, and crisis management training.
The VR training content can be used in standard 3D modelled environments, customised to clients’ own risk profile, although we can also work with clients to incorporate VR training into their own virtual twin, such as a 3D model of a real-life manufacturing plant or industrial facility.
We have successfully created the first VR training content, which covers ‘hot work’, a major cause of property loss. Facilities mandated to carry out hot work such as welding need to continually train, assess and monitor those overseeing and carrying out hot work. Using virtual twin and VR, we can help site managers and operators experience hot work safety procedures in different working environments, with training and assessment all completed in a life-like virtual reality 3D model.
Immersive experiences
Immersive technology provides a ‘close-to-reality’ training experience that enables users to play, and interact with, a virtual plant or facility, and learn about best practices in an entertaining environment. Led by our most experienced risk engineers, trainees can be teleported into a virtual factory, identifying potential issues, and collaboratively suggesting and testing solutions in a virtual environment, using real data and analytics.
VR has several advantages over traditional training and distance learning techniques, as trainees are better able to visualise risk in a dynamic interactive near-reality environment. Information retention is higher with an immersive training experience, while VR enables users to interact with the environment, skilled trainers and fellow trainees.
Using VR and customised 3D modelling, we can deliver more effective, engaging, and efficient risk prevention training at a local plant level, encouraging safer working, reducing incidents and losses. Training using digital twins can also give risk professionals near-reality experience of risks, and support a more consistent implementation of risk management controls and practices across different locations.
Enhanced risk engineering and claims
Digital twins, and VR technology more widely, also present a huge opportunity to improve business processes and build resilience through broader risk analysis, loss and mitigation simulation, and claims service optimisation. In the event of a claim, for example, a digital twin would help insurers, brokers, loss adjusters and customers exchange information and use 3D scans to assess damage and accelerate repair or re-construction.
AXA XL is developing its digital twin platform, in collaboration with AXA’s Digital Commercial Platform and AXA Next, to complement its risk engineering and consulting services. The VR technology is supported by AXA XL’s existing risk scanning platform, which enables our engineers to capture risk-data from customers remotely or during site visits. Once a client’s site and risk characteristics are captured digitally and modelled in 3D, it opens the door to a range of potential benefits and services.
There are also exciting potential use cases for digital twins for risk simulation, helping underwriters, clients and risk engineers better understand and visualise risks, run scenarios and test the effectiveness of loss prevention and mitigation actions in a dynamic collaborative environment. For example, risk managers can visualise the effects of extreme weather events on their facilities in virtual reality, consider loss prevention measures, and test out the effectiveness of flood defences.
Scalable risk solutions
The development of a digital twin platform is just one exciting area of innovation enabling AXA XL to better support our commercial clients as they grow their businesses in a rapidly changing risk landscape. Under AXA XL’s ‘payer to partner’ strategy, we continue to leverage new technology and partnerships to develop insurance specific solutions, embed them, and make them available to clients globally.
