This $5 billion insurance company likes to talk up its AI. Now it's in a mess over it

A key part of insurance company Lemonade's pitch to investors and customers is its ability to disrupt the normally staid insurance industry with artificial intelligence. It touts friendly chatbots like AI Maya and AI Jim, which help customers sign up for policies for things like homeowners' or pet health insurance, and file claims through Lemonade's app. And it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from public and private market investors, in large part by positioning itself as an AI-powered tool.

Yet less than a year after its public market debut, the company, now valued at $5 billion, finds itself in the middle of a PR controversy related to the technology that underpins its services. On Twitter and in a blog post on Wednesday, Lemonade explained why it deleted what it called an "awful thread" of tweets it had posted on Monday. Those now-deleted tweets had said, among other things, that the company's AI analyzes the videos that users submit when they file insurance claims for signs of fraud, picking up "non-verbal cues that traditional insurers can't, since they don't use a digital claims process."