Google’s Schmidt: Insurance About to ‘Explode’ With Uses for Big Data

By Brian Womack and Trish Regan | November 25, 2013

Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said new technologies that help companies analyze vast amounts of digital information have the power to bring change to the insurance, health-care and energy industries.

“Insurance is the most obvious” industry “about to explode” with uses for big data, said Schmidt, who spoke today at The Year Ahead: 2014, a conference in Chicago hosted by Bloomberg LP. Better cost controls and more efficient delivery of services are two ways data can transform industries, he said.

Schmidt and Dan Wagner, who led the analytics team for President Barack Obama’s 2012 run for re-election, discussed ways companies and government regulators can use algorithms — similar to those applied to voter-registration data in the campaign — to sort through the available troves of information about people and markets to help them boost productivity.

Health-care providers and hospitals could use data to target services to those most at risk, which could help lower the cost of care, Schmidt said. In the disparate energy markets, flows could be more accurately modeled, revealing patterns of overuse or underuse, he said.

Wagner is now chief executive officer of Civis Analytics, a consulting firm he founded with Schmidt’s backing.

“This is the future of almost everything that we’re doing,” Schmidt said. “The state of the art is that you apply something called machine intelligence, where you use artificial- intelligence techniques to go through all this data and look for interesting patterns.”

–Editors: Jillian Ward, Reed Stevenson

Topics Data Driven Google

Was this article valuable?

Here are more articles you may enjoy.

Latest Comments

  • March 6, 2015 at 4:24 pm
    County Line says:
    Chilling. Big Brother doesn't always come in government form.
  • April 8, 2014 at 1:11 pm
    CarKnopf says:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUoCHC-i7_o IBM CEO Ginni Rometty discusses the use of big data and the ways in which organizations are learning to compete in a new landscape.
  • December 3, 2013 at 10:28 am
    ExciteBiker says:
    What was lambasted is that, despite Google's cooperation with specific legal requests, the NSA went ahead and secretly helped themselves to the whole honey jar. And if you don... read more

Add a CommentSee All Comments (5)Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

More News
More News Features