CCC has offered programs with artificial intelligence, IoT and telematics for many years and, up until now, has had a program to populate a version 1 estimate through artificial intelligence (AI).
Through the new CCC Smart Estimate tool which was introduced earlier this month and uses estimating logic and AI photo analytics capabilities, instead of the adjuster writing the estimate from scratch and using the desktop, the smart tool will automatically write the first estimate for them. The adjuster can then look over the estimate and sign off on it, or adjust things as necessary.
And, the new tool is able to save time in writing estimates because it eliminates the step of the adjuster writing the first version of the estimate. In the future, the software could be introduced into body shops and produce fewer supplements for the shop as well as save time for the repairer by eliminating total losses being brought into the facility.
Up until now, a customer would send a single photo to the CCC mobile app to show damage on a vehicle. The photo would be used to determine if the car were a total loss or repairable, which is the first injection of AI into the process.
If the car is repairable, the customer is asked to take more photos and CCC will guide the customer to take the correct photographs. Those photographs get sent back to the insurance company and the company could then build an estimate on the desktop while being able to zoom in and out, change contrast, change lighting, show heat maps with the technology that shows damage from the photo automatically, write a manual estimate and send it back to the customer, said Jason Verlen, CCC senior vice president, product management.
The new tool will give the adjuster hints on areas he or she can look at to find further, underlying damage. For example, it might show a part that needs to be repaired and areas that could be removed to get to the part and replaced after the part is taken out. Through the whole process, the final estimate can be written faster, Verlen said.
Time Savings at Each Step:
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On site: If a person is driving around all day, getting out of the car and doing an estimate by hand, on average the person will do about 4 per day.
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In the office: If a virtual estimate is written by hand, then adjusters tend to write about 14 per day.
“The experience in the beta form of the software shows significant improvement on the 14 estimates,” Verlen says.
In the short term, the offering is exclusively for insurance companies but in the long term the company believes it will be useful for all body shops.
A possible benefit of the new product in the future could be more accurate estimates and fewer supplements for body shops, Verlen indicated. And, the technology could save total losses from being brought into a body shop at all.
