{"id":79684,"date":"2025-10-14T10:24:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T10:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/79684\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T10:24:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T10:24:12","slug":"pet-insurer-puts-cap-on-recruitment-to-make-staff-use-ai-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/79684\/","title":{"rendered":"Pet insurer puts cap on recruitment to make staff use AI better"},"content":{"rendered":"

Waggel, the pet insurance company, is capping its employee numbers at 100 and handing the rest of the work to artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n

Andrew Leal, co-founder and chief executive of Waggel, which insures more than 200,000 pets in the UK, said that while he wants the company to be the \u201cmost human pet insurer\u201d ever, he is setting a limit on recruitment to encourage his team to make more extensive use of AI tools.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think we\u2019re operating very efficiently if we can keep it to about 100 people,\u201d Leal said. \u201cAI is never supposed to replace any of the people. It is supposed to make all their lives easier, so they can be a lot more friendly with our customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Is your job under threat from the march of the machines?<\/a><\/p>\n

Waggel is growing quickly, has 95 employees and expects to hit 100 by the end of the year. Lean said his 100 limit is not \u201ccast in stone\u201d and that he would hire more people depending on the company\u2019s needs. He also wants every customer interaction with Waggel to have humans involved, at least at some stage. <\/p>\n

Last week Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder of Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, said AI has allowed the company to shrink its workforce<\/a> from 7,400 people to about 3,000, while increasing revenues and customers.<\/p>\n

Waggel launched an AI chatbot at the start of the year and it is now handling about 52 per cent of customer queries. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs we teach [the chatbot] more and more, we don\u2019t have to hire in more people, Leal said. \u201cThe chatbot can take more of the simpler questions \u2014 the more routine ones \u2014 and then [for] the more complicated stuff, that\u2019s where the team can take it,\u201d Leal said. <\/p>\n

Waggel is also planning to use AI in its claims-handling process. Leal said he wants AI to be used to summarise customers\u2019 medical notes that are sent to support an insurance claim. The claims handlers are all registered vet nurses assigned to each pet\u2019s case. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want [AI] to get to the point where it\u2019s doing everything,\u201d Leal said. \u201cWe want it to take away all those horrible little tasks that our claims handlers and our operations team have to focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waggel was founded in 2018 by Leal and Ross Fretten, who had appeared on the BBC television series The Apprentice in the same year. Neither had experience in insurance before creating the business. The company generated revenues of \u00a311 million in 2024 and is projecting \u00a315 million for 2025. <\/p>\n

It offers a \u201clifetime\u201d policy that covers a pet\u2019s ongoing conditions for their whole lives. Annual limits range from \u00a31,000 to \u00a315,000, with up to \u00a32 million in third-party liability if a dog injures someone or causes damage. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Waggel, the pet insurance company, is capping its employee numbers at 100 and handing the rest of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-79684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}