Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used by insurers, rental car companies, vehicle auction houses and others to more accurately assess vehicle damage, automate claims processing and avoid disputes.
Click-Ins is a company that uses AI and its own proprietary system that taps a mix of computer vision, photogrammetry and simulated environments to capture dents, scrapes, cave-ins, paint scratches and other damage more accurately than the human eye.
“We just see a very high level of accuracy because of the way that our technology works,” Click-Ins CEO Josh Parsons said in an interview with PYMNTS.
The company, co-headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri and Netanya, Israel, uses a novel approach: It generates ultra-realistic simulations of vehicles using its own CAD software. These digital twins are then subjected to millions of permutations — reflections, lighting, dirt, snow, scratches, dents — to train its AI to identify real-world damage with high precision.
Click-in’s approach differentiates it from other companies offering similar services, including CCC Intelligent Solutions, Tractable, Solera, UVEye and Snapsheet. To be sure, they all have their own distinctive methods; UVeye’s solution includes vehicles driven through a scanning tunnel equipped with advanced cameras.
Since Click-Ins simulates millions of variations of vehicles under many permutations, its AI gets a broad dataset to train on — it doesn’t have to rely on limited real-world photos. This makes the artificial intelligence system smarter about spotting damage.
“You can take pictures of the car and you have a baseline for the existing condition of the car before the insurance policies” apply, Parsons said. “We’re really good at identifying damage on cars just through a picture.”
Parsons said the company’s founders, Eugene Greenberg and Dmitry Geyzersky, spent seven and a half years on R&D before they went to market. Greenberg has an insurance background while Geyzersky worked in technology as well as in Israeli intelligence, according to Parsons.
Click-Ins is backed by several investors, including the KCRise Fund (Kansas City), Mobilion Ventures (Israel) and Shlomo SIXT, the Israeli franchisee of the SIXT rental car company.
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Serving 4 Industries
Click-Ins initially focused on insurance fraud detection. The firm has expanded its use cases to cover four key verticals: insurance, auto auctions, rentals and vehicle transport.
In the insurance industry, Click-Ins’ software lets insurers send a simple web app link to customers who then photograph their vehicles using guided prompts. Eight photos taken with their smartphone provide a 360-degree view of the car’s exterior. The AI detects any damage with high precision under different lighting conditions or object reflections.
“We can take a picture of a car out in the driveway and it can have reflections of trees. It can have reflections from the ground. It can have dirt on it – and our technology is able to isolate all those,” Parsons said.
Insurers use the tech in two main ways: to establish a damage baseline of a car before issuing a policy, and to automate or route claims after an incident. A patented system compares new images against the original baseline to flag pre-existing damage, reducing fraudulent claims.
Automation works especially well for smaller damages. “Say you’re going through a drive-through at Starbucks and you scratch the side of your car on a pole all the way down the side,” Parsons said. “That’s a claim that an adjuster should never have to come out and look at.”
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Parsons said Click-Ins is being deployed by major auction companies such as OpenLane to document vehicle condition before sale. By automating the inspection process, the tech improves trust and reduces time spent on manual assessments.
Rental car companies like Shlomo SIXT have adopted Click-Ins to streamline pickup and drop-off inspections. The software logs the car’s condition before and after each rental, reducing disputes over damage and enhancing customer satisfaction.
The fourth major application is in vehicle transport — where cars are moved on flatbed trucks or rail and frequently sustain minor damage. Click-Ins can speed up and standardize the before-and-after inspection process, eliminating paper forms and human subjectivity.
Parsons sees a growth opportunity in offering the tool directly to consumers as a travel insurance add-on. An inexpensive Click-Ins app for consumers could prevent disputes between the user and the rental car company, Parsons said.
Looking ahead, the company plans to expand in North America, the world’s largest automotive market, as well as Asia and South Africa. Click-Ins is already making inroads in Europe, Parsons said.
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Source: https://www.pymnts.com/
