How Nationwide is Using $100M in AI to Revolutionize Insurance Claims and Customer Service

Nationwide's $100M AI Investment in Claims Efficiency

When an insurance giant like Nationwide undertakes a major revamp of its claims operation with artificial intelligence and new technology, there are significant implications for both the company and its customers.

The Columbus, Ohio-based insurance and financial services company, which offers a range of products including auto, home, life, and business insurance, holds an A+ rating from both A.M. Best and S&P. The Fortune 100 company with more than 24,000 employees promotes itself as having a strong focus on customer service. The company began offering 24-hour claims service in 1960, reportedly the first carrier to do so.

Lately, Nationwide has been putting substantial resources into AI and updating its claims operations. The company announced a $1.5 billion investment through 2028 in technology innovation initiatives, with $100 million earmarked for advancing AI each year for the next three years.

To understand these changes, Claims Journal spoke with Guru Vasudeva, senior vice president and chief technology officer of property/casualty technology at Nationwide.

Guru Vasudeva

Key AI Implementations in Claims Processing

Vasudeva explained that Nationwide has been building on their investments in the Guidewire claim center and recently migrated all contact centers to Genesis Cloud, which provides better voice recognition and natural language processing capabilities.

One of the most significant implementations is what they call Claims Log Notes summarization using generative AI. This technology addresses a critical pain point in the claims process.

"When a customer calls the call center and asks for a status or information about their claim, the CSR (claims service representative) has to read all these log notes from all the various interactions that the customer has had with Nationwide," Vasudeva explained. "That takes time—maybe three to four minutes—and it's frustrating for the customer who has to wait."

With the Claims Log Notes summarization, generative AI creates an ongoing summary of all customer interactions. Every time a CSR looks up a customer, they instantly see a comprehensive summary of what has happened across all log notes.

"That is an incredibly good use-case of using generative AI and we already put that in production," Vasudeva said. "It's highly leveraged by our CSRs; they love the speed. It also helps customers because now they can get answers quicker."

Benefits Beyond Speed

The technology isn't just about faster processing times. Vasudeva emphasized that it's empowering CSRs to focus on the empathy aspect of customer service.

"We're using generative AI with a human in the loop and that's the key part," he said. "We've got another effort, which is Call Transcript Summary, where we leverage transcripts after a call to pre-populate some of the information about the call."

Nationwide is also working on document interpretation using generative AI instead of traditional OCR technology. This reduces manual work for CSRs by quickly interpreting incoming documents, mapping them to the right fields, and ingesting them into the system.

Employee Adoption and Skepticism

When first implementing the Claims Log Notes summarization, Vasudeva acknowledged there was significant skepticism among employees.

"Our employees have a lot of pride in their work. They want to make sure they're really reading through everything and answering questions accurately," he said. "We engaged the employees in this process. This is not an expense-reduction play—it is more of a focus on customer experience and speed-to-answer."

The company asked employees to continue their normal work while also reading the AI-generated summaries, gradually building trust in the system. "While there was some skepticism, we definitely have good adoption of this capability now," Vasudeva reported.

Measuring Success

When asked about metrics for success, Vasudeva highlighted several key indicators:

• Average handle time in call center portions of claims
• Customer experience improvements
• After-survey results measuring customer satisfaction
• Accuracy metrics for specific tools like claims estimation software

"Our focus is more on those kinds of metrics," Vasudeva said. "The big outcome that we are looking for is, is it resulting in better customer experience?"

The Future of AI in Insurance Claims

Vasudeva sees generative AI as fundamentally different from traditional AI that Nationwide has been using for years.

"Generative AI is going to democratize knowledge completely," he said. "It's going to make it easy for everybody to get the insights that they need."

However, he emphasized that human judgment will always remain central to the claims process.

"When you have a loss, when you have an accident, that is a pretty serious life moment and we want to make sure that we are doing it with empathy and there is a human judgment involved," Vasudeva explained. "We will always leverage these technologies as an aid to our claims associates."

Nationwide continues to focus on creating a seamless omnichannel experience across their website, mobile app, call center, and in-person adjuster interactions. The company is constantly evaluating whether to adopt capabilities from partners like Guidewire and Genesis Cloud or build their own solutions for specific needs.

Salazar is a Claims Journal intern. She's a student at Cal State University Long Beach majoring in journalism. She expects to graduate in June, 2026.