CCC Intelligent Solutions Chairman and CEO Githesh Ramamurthy during the company’s Q4 earnings ask Tuesday touted its new Estimate-STP AI-powered product and wide use of another digital product, Engage, by a lot more than 9,000 of their 27,000 repair facility customers.
Engage is really a photo estimate an internet-based appointment tool that can be used to allow customers to initiate estimates and manage their appointments online,” based on CCC’s website.
CCC Pr Director Michelle Hellyar told Repairer Driven News Estimate-STP is an “industry-first, insurer-facing solution,” meaning geared toward use by insurers. Ramamurthy said it “enables a truly touchless straight-through processing experience for our customers along with a critical advance for the industry.”
“This solution fully digitizes the estimating process for qualified repairable claims and shortens the estimating process from days to seconds,” he said. “Momentum is constantly on the build around Estimate-STP as customers embrace the rise in accuracy, speed, and efficiency this AI-powered solution gives the estimation process.”
In response to questions from RDN about the more knowledge about how Estimate-STP is touchless, Hellyar said touchless doesn’t mean humans aren’t involved in the estimating process and qualified claims are based on the insurer. Instead, the AI can be used on vehicles with minor damage to release here we are at employees to “address more complex decisions and to provide personalization and empathy to drivers when they require it more.”
CCC’s AI is developed from a historical database of 16 million annual claims which include final estimates accustomed to complete repairs, and some OEM repair procedures are addressed in the process, which helps to identify what's necessary, she said.
“These final estimates are routinely created using OEM repair procedure data. This contributes to our capability to help insurers generate actionable estimates with line-level detail including the labor time that it will take to correct the car, the parts that will be needed , the repair operations that are likely needed, and taxes for the work to be achieved, for that local market the automobile is within.”
Supplements, she added, are based on both digital technology and human expertise. Estimate-STP is configurable by the insurer, including claim eligibility thresholds and policyholder experience objectives, she added.
CCC “expects to scale” Estimate-STP like a “significant opportunity” over the next many years, according to Ramamurthy.
Ramamurthy said throughout the earnings call that by the end of the quarter, CCC had more than $1 billion of revenue under contract using its 25 largest insurance customers. CCC works with 300 insurance companies, including 18 of the top 20 auto insurers in the country. More than 95 U.S. auto insurers are actively using CCC's “AI-powered capabilities,” he said.
Ramamurthy said CCC continues to purchase parts and total loss by adding parts suppliers, banks, banking institutions, and other car insurance economy participants to its platform. He noted CCC has a lot more than 4,000 parts supplier customers.
The fourth quarter also saw the acquisition of Safekeep, a startup insurtech provider that uses AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to digitize and streamline the “entire subrogation process,” based on Ramamurthy. “Historically, subrogation has been a highly manual and time-intensive process, and digitizing it is a natural extension of our STP vision and platform strategy.”
In January, CCC reported a 50% year-over-year rise in the use of advanced AI with more than 9 million claims processed in 2022.
Another company, Dents.co, a week ago launched its dent measurement app of the same name that utilizes lidar and AI on several iPhone and iPad models. Founder and CEO Jonathan Pyle told RDN Dents.co doesn’t provide estimates or repair plans, but is meant to be utilized for a damage measurement tool with the objective of being complementary to estimating systems.
Pyle, who's also director of business development with Caliber Collision, worked at and helped expand his father’s shop, AutoBody Express, to multiple locations from 2009-2022.
“We had over the years in the industry it just gets more difficult to negotiate in a manner that we liked to negotiate with other stakeholders,” he said. “…increasingly more we weren’t able to talk face-to-face or ever even meet the folks that i was negotiating with so whenever we noticed the ability of contemporary iPhones and iPads with lidar we thought there can be a way to use that technology to determine body damage.”
Lidar emits a few hundred lasers per second to capture “quite a bit” of data in the same time it takes to snap the photo, Pyle said. iPhones and iPads can measure just how long it requires the lasers to return to the device and for that reason figure out how far the consumer is from the panel then AI is used within the app to identify the top damage.
“As we progress and employ additional photos to train our models then we’ll have the ability to increase the layers of useful data about the depth of the damage as well as the height and width that we’re capable of giving now,” Pyle said.
He couldn’t provide RDN with any successful or unsuccessful types of real-life app use because of the small amount of time it’s been live, but he shared how Dents.co tested it prior to the launch. Measuring targets were created with 15-centimeter squares printed on them, which were used as a standard to determine the precision from the app.
The targets were taped to some wall and an iPad Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max were set up .75 meters from them. Forty photos were taken with every device. While the tests were performed in a controlled environment, Pyle noted extremely bright or extremely low external light can sometimes cause less accurate results.
The test answers are summarized within the table below:
| Total Average Variance | % within 1 CM of Target | % within .5 CM of Target | % within .25 CM of Target | |
| iPad Pro | 0.73% | 100% | 97.50% | 80% |
| iPhone 13 Pro Max | 0.04% | 100% | 92.50% | 73.75% |
Both tools reinforce that technology information mill poised to carry on to leverage AI-powered services that will change how vehicle owners, insurers, and repair facilities interact with damage analysis tools.
