INSIDE the Gateshead Allianz hail damage assessment centre, humans and AI work alongside each other in a converted warehouse that looks like something out of a sci-fi film.
A severe hail storm that hit parts of the Hunter on May 26 has seen insurance companies overwhelmed with thousands of claims for damage to both properties and cars, in the worst hail event Newcastle has seen since 2006.
Within just hours of the storm, Hail.com director Joel Knott was working to coordinate an assessment centre alongside Allianz' Disaster and Recovery Team (DART).
"It's very immediate, the hail storm happened on the Friday roughly at lunchtime - once that storm had hit we were informed by Allianz that there were claims coming in already, immediately after the hail storm," he said.
"We could see the span was basically Merewether to Swansea, there were some in Gwandalan and other areas further south but those had the extremes of it.
"By Friday afternoon we were talking to real estate agents trying to source multiple locations."
By Saturday the lease was signed, within 48 hours it was set up and they were ready to quote within a few days.
According to the Insurance Council of Australia, which represents the country's insurance industry, claims for the Newcastle hail event had climbed over 18,000 as of Wednesday afternoon.
Of those, 77.6 per cent are for vehicles and 21.8 per cent are for property.
Inside the assessment centre, Mr Knott and Allianz disaster and recovery adviser Hayley Slater manage each of the some 120 vehicles that come through each day.
"At the end of the day our biggest focus for customers is making sure that their experience is outstanding," Ms Slater said.
"We have our DART team, representation from underwriting as well as our assessing team and Hail.com, so the idea is customers won't have to contact us over the phone or anything after they leave this centre.
"Any question they have, we should be able to answer for them."
When they arrive, customers drive into an assessment tunnel, or the new half-a-million dollar 3D hail scanner which checks every dent in a vehicle using 18, 4K cameras in two minutes.
At the end it spits out a report outlining how many dents are on the car, their size and a quote for repair costs.
It's more accurate than a human is, within a margin of about two to three per cent, and takes less than half the time, Mr Knott said.
"It counts dents so the human doesn't have to," he said.
"It's close to what the human does but it is better at accurately counting the dents over and over."
Generally, lower valued cars are more likely to be written off if the cost of repair exceeds the value of the car.
The team estimates about one in every 10 cars are deemed a write-off.
When the assessments wrap up next week, the team will transform the centre into a workshop and start repairing vehicles.
Mr Knott said it's designed to take the pressure off 'business as usual' work at local smash repairers.
"The volume is massive, that's why these centres are so important to set up because if you flooded all the smash repairers in the area with these cars they'd be 12 or 24 months repairing cars," he said.
"This is a one-stop shop, everything that needs to be done to your car is done here."
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