WIRED magazine on Monday took phone insurance industry’s change to photo-based estimating and photo estimating artificial intelligence — as well as body shops’ criticism of the concepts.
The article presents the broader trends featuring multiple collision industry voices highlighting discrepancies between photo-based estimates and just what the businesses actually detect:
This last paragraph raises a fascinating question for repairers, insurers, consumers and lawmakers to consider.
The overarching shop complaint remains the same: Damage detectable by an in-person human appraiser is overlooked in photo estimating. If true, this becomes much more concerning in situations where shops work blindly from the insurer’s estimate or lack a second set of physically present eyes on the car. The WIRED article suggests one or both of these may be happening:
However, utilizing a human and using an AI are a couple of very different means to acquire a photo estimate. The WIRED article shows how body shops have no method of knowing which one was used. Without that knowledge, repairers — and consumers and regulators — can only guess whether AI photo estimating produces the same problems shops report with traditional photo estimating.
Perhaps this disclosure would be something to incorporate on the estimate along with the remaining 10-point notices and disclaimers. State whether the sheet was completely human-generated or if an AI partially or completely wrote the first estimate. Then shops, officials, information providers, etc., could truly compare these techniques of inspection to each other, to in-person adjusters and to the shop’s final repair plan.
In terms of photo estimating’s efficiency compared to physical adjusters, Mitchell in 2021 reported fairly comparable supplement rates when comparing photo estimates and regular in-person estimates. However, the information provider found photo estimates meant significantly larger supplements proportional to the final repair bill.
CCC data indicates that under Five percent of claims used photos in 2021, and supplements occurred 49.2 percent of the time that year. By 2021, 21 percent of repairable vehicle claims were handled with photos, and the supplement rate was 60.9 %. It’d be interesting to see if there’s any correlation there or if the supplement rate increase would’ve happened anyway given other macro trends, for example like vehicle complexity or better-educated body shops catching more things insurers would miss anyway.
