Automated decision-making: About the use of automated decision-making systems in Swiss insurance companies and the need for explainable decisions

Through automation, a system achieves goals by operating as autonomously as possible. Using artificial intelligence enables a new level of automation - not only simple repetitive process steps can be automated, but also complex decision-making tasks. An industry that profits strongly from these possibilities of automation is the insurance business. Due to the large number of cases that must be processed and many personnel-intensive decisions made. The goal of this thesis is to find out what kind of automated decision-making systems are already in use in Swiss insurance companies and the experiences have been made with them. It is of particular interest to find out about the legal implications of such systems with a limited explainability of automated decisions. For this purpose, the following thesis statement was formulated: It is possible for Swiss insurance companies to use automated decision-making systems with AI technology in processes with customer interaction where the decision logic is not completely comprehensible to humans. In order to investigate this, a qualitative interview is conducted with a random selection of 6 companies out of the 18 largest Swiss insurance companies, which are then analyzed and discussed....