The "2026 Tsinghua Wudaokou Global Finance Forum," organized by Tsinghua University and hosted by its PBC School of Finance, commenced in Chengdu on May 18. The forum gathered global central bank leaders, Nobel laureates in economics, renowned scholars, and top experts to explore new ideas, trends, practices, and drivers in global financial development, offering insights for high-quality financial growth and the advancement of a strong financial sector. During the event, the "White Paper on AI Innovation Applications in the Insurance Industry" was released. This document, led by the China Insurance and Pension Finance Research Center at Tsinghua University's PBC School of Finance, involved months of in-depth research across cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, engaging over a dozen leading insurance institutions and technology firms. It represents the highest current application standards and cutting-edge directions in the "AI + insurance" field. Two AI products from Waterdrop Inc., the AI customer service assistant "Baoxiao Hui" and the AI underwriting expert "KEYI.AI," were both selected for inclusion. This not only signifies authoritative recognition of the company's deep expertise in insurtech but also sets a practical benchmark for the industry's intelligent transformation.
Wei Chenyang, Director of the China Insurance and Pension Finance Research Center and the Financial MBA Education Center at Tsinghua University's PBC School of Finance, highlighted in the report interpretation that artificial intelligence is rapidly integrating into various aspects of economic and social development, becoming a key force driving the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation. For the insurance industry, AI applications are no longer just tools for efficiency enhancement but are profoundly influencing business models, service methods, risk management systems, and industry governance logic.
Waterdrop Inc. is among the earliest companies in the insurance sector to deploy large-scale AI models, building a proprietary capability system centered on "Waterguard AI." This system is evolving into the "central nervous system" of insurance services, widely applied in scenarios such as intelligent customer service, underwriting, quality inspection, and product innovation, comprehensively enhancing the efficiency and quality of the entire insurance service process. The featured "Baoxiao Hui" and "KEYI.AI" represent innovative applications in customer service and underwriting, two core areas.
"Baoxiao Hui" redefines the insurance customer service interaction experience with a voice response time of just 1.5 seconds. Despite years of development in intelligent customer service within the insurance industry, challenges like delayed responses and misinterpretation of intent have persisted, failing to meet clients' professional and complex needs. To address these issues, Waterdrop's development team designed an innovative AI Agent architecture capable of real-time voice interaction, creating an efficient "intelligent hub." With a voice response time of merely 1.5 seconds, it effectively eliminates the lag typical in traditional voice interactions, delivering a near-human conversational experience and setting an industry-leading standard. Moreover, "Baoxiao Hui" can engage in natural, fluid multi-turn dialogues while seamlessly integrating with backend business systems to handle tasks like policy inquiries and modifications. This human-like interaction rhythm and efficient, precise business processing capability not only significantly reduce user wait times due to issue transfers but also transform AI into a warm, thoughtful "service partner."
"KEYI.AI" revolutionizes the insurance application experience with second-level decision-making, achieving an underwriting accuracy rate of 99.8%. Underwriting, a core aspect of insurance risk control, often suffers from issues like non-standardized medical records and complex policy terms, impacting user experience. Traditional underwriting relies heavily on manual review, interpreting and judging vast amounts of unstructured medical data, which is not only time-consuming and inefficient but also prone to subjective errors. Waterdrop introduced the industry's first AI underwriting expert, "KEYI.AI," leveraging the deep reasoning capabilities of large AI models. It provides second-level responses to professional insurance queries such as risk assessment, coverage recommendations, policy interpretation, and claims process explanations. This reduces the average processing time for complex health insurance underwriting by 80%, achieves a 99.8% accuracy rate, improves underwriting response speed by 260 times, and increases the likelihood of rejected clients finding suitable alternative insurance products sixfold.
Building an AI product matrix to embrace the digital and intelligent future of insurance. In recent years, breakthroughs in technologies like generative AI are profoundly altering the technological foundation and business reconstruction logic of the insurance industry. The White Paper notes that this wave of technological change not only provides more mature technical conditions for deeply embedding AI into core business processes like underwriting, claims, customer service, and risk control but also significantly expands the value potential for efficiency gains, cost optimization, and service innovation. According to McKinsey estimates, generative AI could bring about $70 billion in productivity gains to the insurance industry and approximately $260 billion to the closely related health and wellness sectors.
Amid this technological wave, Waterdrop Inc. has committed to an "All in AI" strategy. Since 2021, the company has focused on building its "Waterguard Intelligence" system, concentrating AI talent and resources to drive innovation in insurtech, healthcare, and general office applications. To date, the company has filed over 100 AI-related patents, including 72 for large model technologies. In 2026, its self-developed Waterguard AI Assistant—ClawSquare—was launched. Based on a distributed architecture, it enables AI Agents with different functions to autonomously communicate and collaborate on tasks, starting with internal office synergy and gradually extending to core business scenarios in insurance and healthcare.
Shen Peng, Founder and CEO of Waterdrop Inc., stated that the company aims to evolve from a "tech company using AI" to an "AI-native tech company," becoming a new entity driven by AI at its core with intelligent collaborative capabilities. Moving forward, Waterdrop will continue to deepen the application of technology in insurance and service scenarios, promoting the ongoing integration of AI, big data, and other digital capabilities into insurtech and health management. By collaborating with industry partners, the company seeks to build new paradigms for an intelligent economy and drive the insurance industry toward greater efficiency and sustainability.
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