Bajaj Life Prioritising Candidates with AI Experience, Focussing On Upskilling

Bajaj Life Insurance has moved on from PoC stage to widespread AI deployments. While AI is live in several functions, the objective is now to integrate it into all layers of the customer, distributor and employee workflows. FE FUTECH speaks with Rajesh Krishnan, Chief – Operations and Customer Experience, Bajaj Life Insurance, to know more about the company’s AI plans.

What challenges have you faced and continue to face in the CX space and how are you trying to solve it using the power of technology and digital? 

Customer expectations are evolving rapidly, with growing demand for instant solutions, round the clock visibility, and intuitive digital experiences. Our focus has been on strengthening our digital ecosystem and making digital journeys the preferred choice.

We are enhancing digital awareness through personalised, multi-channel nudges across our app, portal, WhatsApp, SMS, and web. Contextual notifications and event-based alerts help customers discover and complete transactions digitally with ease. At assisted touchpoints, we share standalone journey links so customers can complete requests instantly while building confidence in self-service.

Internally, we are deepening AI capabilities by investing in AI skills among our people, establishing AI champions, and expanding safe enterprise grade GenAI and Agentic AI exposure. Candidates with AI skills and digital problem-solving experience naturally come with an advantage for future problem solving and strengthens our talent pipeline.

Collectively, these steps help us keep pace with changing expectations.

What is the team composition you have and how is it changing as AI prominence? 

Our team structure is evolving as AI becomes central to our business operations. While domain expertise remains strong, teams are being equipped with AI and GenAI skills to complement functional strengths. Representatives from each team are trained to identify practical AI use cases within daily workflows. We have rolled out enterprise level AI platforms with guardrails and data protection, enabling safe experimentation and hands-on learning.

Our hiring now also evaluates candidates on AI and GenAI project experience, aligning the talent pipeline with our digital ambition. Overall, the model is shifting to a hybrid structure where subject expertise is paired with AI readiness, enabling faster innovation and efficient customer experiences. 

What’s the AI strategy at Bajaj Life especially in CX and Ops. Please share some of the POCs you are running and how many of your projects have reached from the POC to the production stage in the past? 

Our AI strategy is built around using intelligence to make experiences faster, simpler, and more human. Over the past two years, we have moved from limited experimentation to scaled deployments across multiple areas of businesses.

We are currently using Generative AI in extractions, summarisations, conversations with various customers & distributor interactions. This is helping us substantially improve our lead time, while bringing in standardisation, quality and scale in our business operations.

Voice automation, Interaction summarisations and content generation are few areas that have been at the forefront of our use case journey.

GenAI is also powering our various bots, to support employees & distributors with instant answers, proactive learning nudges, coaching and pitches.

Many of these initiatives began as experiments and are now in production. We are not stopping at that and further trying to expand AI use cases towards fraud risk detection. 

Our vision is to embed AI in every layer of the customer, employee & distributor journeys, interactions using artificial intelligence as an invisible yet powerful backbone of how we operate, without losing human empathy. 

What are some of the recent initiatives undertaken by Bajaj Life in customer experience and overall operations (FY25 and FY26)? 

In recent years, Bajaj Life advanced its digital first strategy by upgrading core digital assets, modernising service journeys, and embedding automation across onboarding, servicing, claims, and underwriting. Our customer experience (CX) agenda is centred on simplicity, speed, consistency and predictability.

Strengthening Digital Assets: We enhanced our Mobile App, Portal, WhatsApp, and Chatbot to improve usability, shorten journeys, and ensure service parity across channels. 

Digitised and Simplified Journeys: High volume servicing and onboarding journeys were re-engineered with deeper policy system integrations, real time validations, and automated decision making. This reduced customer effort and improved instant resolutions across digital touchpoints.

Automated Processing of Claims: We leverage new age technologies in our Claims processing and are continuously investing in improving our Claims processes to deliver superior Customer Experience. Digital document submissions, eKYC, and automated workflows have created a paperless and seamless claims environment. As a result, more than half of our total Claims settled are within one working day. 

Smarter, Paperless Underwriting: Underwriting journeys were redesigned with digital annexures, online financial submissions, and AI driven medical summarisation. This improved automation and reduced decision turnaround times. 

Digital Governance and Transparency: Unified digital trackers for policy issuance, servicing, and claims provide real time visibility. Automated workflow checks and data led controls have strengthened predictability.

Overall, these initiatives have organically nudged our customers to adopt digital platforms towards a seamless, automated, transparent lifecycle experience, and service their transactions without assistance.

What’s your vendor, partner strategy? 

Our partner strategy is built around core fundamental parameters. We first assess capability fit in terms of domain depth, and proven execution strength. Scalability and technology readiness are also critical parameters, with preference towards Partnership that enable simple solutions for complex problems. 

We look for total value, efficiency impact, and long-term sustainability. 

One of the major challenges you must be facing is balancing customer ease and security, how do you balance both? 

Balancing customer ease and security is a continuous design discipline, and our philosophy is to embed security in a way that strengthens trust without adding friction. Our risk based adaptive security model evaluates behaviour and context in real time. Low risk journeys remain seamless, while higher risk scenarios trigger additional verification.

We leverage biometrics and adaptive authentication, analytics driven risk scoring, end to end encryption, secure APIs, tokenization, and strict access governance. This ensures smooth and intuitive interactions while keeping customer data secure. Data security works quietly in the background while convenience remains at the forefront.

In essence, our goal is to ensure an experience comprising  both ease and assurance. 

Discuss your partnership with Infosys and how does it contribute to the customer experience value chain?  

Our partnership with Infosys plays a strategic role in strengthening our customer experience value chain. As we drive large scale digital transformation, Infosys brings deep engineering expertise across technology modernization, product innovation, and speed to market. A key aspect of this collaboration is the shift from legacy monolithic systems to a microservices led architecture, giving us the flexibility to scale individual capabilities without impacting the entire ecosystem. This improves system performance, reliability, and customer journeys. 

The partnership also promises cloud led modernization of our core platform, enhancing scalability and ensuring responsive, resilient customer facing systems. Modular components shall enable faster product configuration and launches, significantly compressing go to market timelines and helping us respond quickly to evolving customer needs and regulatory requirements.

Overall, this collaboration is helping us design a future ready, agile customer experience built on a modern digital foundation, enabling seamless and intuitive experiences across the lifecycle.

What role will technology and digital play in IRDAI’s vision of  ‘Insurance for All by 2047’ ? 

Technology and digital will be fundamental to achieving IRDAI’s vision of ‘Insurance for All by 2047’. The required scale cannot be reached through traditional models alone. Digital tools, automation, and AI have the capability to accelerate the path towards covering insurance in demography that is under covered. 

Data and analytics support personalised, need based products, improving relevance and adoption. AI driven servicing, digital claims, and multilingual self-service can potentially enhance accessibility, especially in remote and semi urban areas. Public data infrastructure such as UPI and Account Aggregator, along with digital distribution platforms are already making inroads in ensuring insurance reaches customers where they already transact.

In essence, digital technology backed by AI promises to make insurance simpler, more affordable, and inclusive by 2047.