Allstate Introduces Large Language Model, ALLIE

Allstate CEO Tom Wilson said the insurer has a “technology-drive strategy, not a strategy supported by technology.”

And the next step in the strategy is the build of ALLIE – Allstate’s Large Language Intelligent Ecosystem.

Speaking to analysts during a call to discuss second-quarter earnings, Wilson said ALLIE is not completely built or deployed, but it “should help us to reduce our expenses.” He stopped short of providing any predictions of cost savings or growth.

“Jesse [Merten, president of Property-Liability] has already got a lot of work going on to take work out of agent offices, which will reduce our distribution expenses,” he said. “We think there’s a bunch of other expenses [ALLIE] can help us reduce. We think it can help us be more accurate in pricing, more accurate in our claims.”

Related: Allstate Q2 Net Income Jumps 56% on Underwriting

Wilson said the insurer, as part of its “transformative growth” initiative, has “250 highly sophisticated analytical models” to support and make decisions by using 40 petabytes (40 million gigabytes) of data and billion of central processing unit hours to “generate 100 million quotes, purchase 50 million leads often with sub-second response times, and manage hundreds of million of customer interactions.”

“Now this platform is enabling us to build ALLIE, which will leverage agentic AI to improve customer value, lower cost, and increase growth,” Wilson said. The coordination and configuration of the computer systems it has already built “is helping us accelerate the build and deployment of ALLIE.”

Wilson told the analysts that the large language model is “just another step along the continuum that we’ve been on for a long time” when it comes to artificial intelligence.

“AI will help further improve what we already know how to do,” he said. As far as expense, Wilson said Allstate is “not having any barriers right now to investing money and getting good returns.”

The chief executive did offer some comment when cybersecurity was raised. He said Allstate spends a “tremendous amount of time and effort on cybersecurity,” adding he is “concerned about the large language models that now break out on their own and tell other agents how to do it without getting caught.”

“I think that is an issue that the country really needs to deal with,” Wilson said. Allstate uses only internal LLMs, so the company is “not worried about our data being exfiltrated or scooped up in the knowledge of someone else’s LLM, so one of our competitors can use it,” he added.