Pie Insurance, a tech-enabled provider of workers’ compensation insurance to small businesses, launched its new pay-as-you-go billing platform.

With this platform, new Pie policyholders can pay for their workers’ comp insurance policy on their individual payroll cycle, avoiding the need for an initial deposit. Pie works with customers and their payroll providers to ensure accurate premium payments throughout a policy term.

The platform, initially offered through Reliable Premium Management, was developed to make the commercial insurance experience more cost-effective for small business owners.

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Tractable, a company that has been developing artificial intelligence (AI) for visual assessment and disaster recovery since 2014, launched AI Property, a new platform that assesses damage to buildings caused by hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters.

AI Property allows anyone with a smartphone to assess the external condition of a damaged property through a mobile-friendly, web-based app. This is done by taking photos and submitting them to Tractable’s AI platform, which aims to mitigate the challenge of having appraisers onsite to assess damage in the wake of disaster.

The AI, which has been trained on a large database of claims and damaged property, makes an immediate assessment of the amount of damage it sees and relays this to the homeowner’s insurer.

Tractable has been working in Japan with insurer MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings Inc. to use AI Property to help homeowners in Japan during the country’s 2021 typhoon season. The technology has already been used to process real claims from October’s Typhoon Mindulle.

After a typhoon, MS&AD policyholders can use the AI to take pictures of high frequency, wind-related damage to a fence, wall, or other outdoor area with their smartphone and send them to their insurer for assessment. In the future, MS&AD and Tractable expect to expand AI coverage to include indoor damage, such as water leakage and smoke.

For now, MS&AD will use the AI only for wide-area disasters such as typhoons, and the estimates calculated by AI will be verified by humans. Insurers deploying the AI first and over the largest number of cases will see it learn and attain full automation the fastest, Tractable said in a press release.