Insurance executives have caught the AI bug, but more for efficiency gains than imagining new business models.

AI is everywhere now in the insurance industry and yet talk of true ‘digital transformation’ seems stuck.

If this transformation is about efficiencies, automation, and working around legacy mainframes, then yes, the use of artificial intelligence is part of an ongoing process – perhaps speeding things up, but not breaking new ground.

If it’s about fundamentally reimagining business processes, customer engagement and product innovation, then perhaps talk of AI, particularly generative AI and the use of large-language models, is better for conference fodder. To be sure, no one in the industry seems to be rethinking incentives of how insurers work with banks and agency forces to sell products.

That is the impression DigFin has from the public comments at a recent industry event on digital insurance.

On the one hand, there is a sense of drama. The intuitive, democratic nature of genAI has rightfully put the scare into C-suites.

As Orchis Li, General Manager at Gen Re Hong Kong, said, “It’s no longer about digital transformation, it’s now about survival.”

From the perspective of efficiency gains, firms are now enthusiastically embracing automation tools. While this is not new, genAI brings this process down to individual initiatives, instead of just being about a top-down project managed by the chief technology officer. This is exciting.

Most firms have already gone through digitization, converting analog records into structured, machine-readable data, and using it to ditch manual processes.

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