| | April 20218WHY ERGO SHIFTED TO AN END-TO-END AI APPROACHBy Mark Klein, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), ERGO GroupThe ERGO insurance company is one of the leading digital players in the German insurance business. We established the first insurance contract to which customers can subscribe via a smart speaker, and brought the first fully digitalized insurer to the market. And now new ­ developed from ERGO's advanced analytics unit, the IT infrastructure locally known as the AI Factory allows the industrialisation of AI model development and seamless integration within the business segments of the 170-year-old company.Why are data scientists leaving their jobs? A colleague of mine sent me a blog post written by a data scientist oddly with this same title. His statement suggests some disappointment within the scientist community. One of his arguments that struck me is the idea that some data scientists are obviously confronted with a differing reality when it comes to their everyday work. While initially meant to develop cutting-edge algorithms, the reality of collecting, structuring, and sorting internal data for the foundation to develop algorithms has become a shift in job scope. To be perfectly honest, the insurance industry requires us to handle varying amounts of imperfect data. Data ingestion and data preparation are important parts of our work. However, only focussing on model development is not the sole remit, it is just one part of a supply chain - that ends with the implementation of the algorithm into the business lines. To manage this in an end-to-end approach is, in my opinion, the key to being successful with your AI strategy (and of course being happy in your job).A standardised setting for changing requirementsThis was the reason behind us bringing our brand new AI Factory to life as a standardised process chain. We combine the model development environment with existing applications and data sources - it´s like a car factory assembly line. In the beginning, you add all the components, all the `stuff' needed, then at the other end the cars roll out ready to go. Our AI factory has three main areas. One is data ingestion, which collects and structures internal data from all customer related ERGO insurance companies. The second is the data lab where preparation, development, and shadow modelling take place. From here, our car moves to the third area, the production centre, where integration of business processes takes place. This brings a lot of advantages for us. We are flexible in combining core IT capabilities with the latest data science tech-nology. We are cost-effec-tive, flexible in integrat-ing into any production environment, and are able to react to changing loads and requirements. At ERGO, this is an important task for our data engi-neers.IN MY OPINIONMark Klein
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