The latest from Evident AI for you;
Insurers doubled down on their adoption of AI over the past year, with Allianz overtaking AXA as the global leader in AI adoption, according to the annual Evident AI Index for Insurance released today.
Allianz’s lead is due in part to its AI talent pool – the largest in the industry, with around 28% more AI specialists than AXA, the next largest. These two leaders jointly account for 20% of AI Development talent sector-wide. Allianz has also now registered 900 AI use cases worldwide.
However, the gap between the frontrunners and the rest of the industry has narrowed significantly, with Manulife, Zurich and Liberty Mutual rounding out a tightening top five. Zurich saw the biggest rise in the ranking, moving from 12th position to 4th, bolstered by rapid AI headcount growth and increased numbers of disclosed use cases with outcomes.
|
2026 RANKING
|
2025 RANKING
|
||
|
Insurer
|
Overall Index Ranking
|
Insurer
|
Overall Index Ranking
|
|
Allianz
|
1
|
AXA
|
1
|
|
AXA
|
2
|
Allianz
|
2
|
|
Manulife
|
3
|
USAA
|
3
|
|
Zurich
|
4
|
Intact Financial
|
4
|
|
Liberty Mutual
|
5
|
Manulife
|
5
|
Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Evident, comments: “The key takeaway is that the capabilities that once set the frontrunners apart are becoming more widespread. Mature, integrated AI setups are no longer the preserve of the few early movers. Instead, they are becoming embedded across the industry.”
“Insurance is entering a new phase of AI adoption. Up to this point, the priority by and large has been about laying the foundations. Now we’re seeing a growing emphasis on execution and scaling, with AI influencing underwriting, claims management and fraud detection across product categories.”
The report found that insurers’ AI ambitions are being underpinned by a race for talent. The number of AI specialists grew 32% over the past year, even as overall insurance industry headcount fell by 2.2%. AI specialists now account for one in every 50 employees at insurers in the Index.
A small number of insurers are now able to evidence that their AI investment is creating value. Manulife and Generali have joined Intact Financial in publicly disclosing estimated AI ROI, becoming only the second and third insurers to do so.
Manulife generated more than $217m in value from AI during 2025 and projects $723m in gains by the end of 2027.1 Generali reported $116m in bottom-line impact last year, rising to a projected $407m in 2027.2 Intact Financial, the first insurer to report publicly, recently revised its 2025 figure upward by 33% to $145m, with $361m projected by the end of the decade.3 Across all three, that’s over $1bn in projected value.
Further, in the past six months, one in four (25%) newly disclosed use cases showed evidence of agentic AI, systems capable of connecting multiple steps in a process and making decisions autonomously. Six months prior, that figure was one in twenty.
Christian Preece, Insurance Director at Evident, says: “For years, insurers have competed on AI ambition, but now the focus is shifting from what insurers are building to the value they’re creating. In itself, it’s a sign of AI maturity to have the internal capability to measure these figures and be confident enough to disclose them. As the first industry leaders disclose hard return on investment data, they’re providing the kind of evidence that shareholders and boards have been looking for in light of increasing concerns around the costs of AI, and we can expect to see more insurers going public in the coming year.”
The Index, developed by AI benchmarking and intelligence platform Evident, covers 30 of the leading property and casualty (P&C), life, composite, and reinsurance insurance groups across North America and Europe. An independent, outside-in assessment based on public data4, it provides the most comprehensive benchmark of AI maturity across the insurance industry.
The next frontier – agentic
AI use case disclosure is growing but it remains concentrated at the top. Allianz, AXA, Manulife, Travelers and Zurich alone account for 48% of well-documented use cases across the sector, and half of firms outside the top 10 are still not reporting publicly.
The use cases themselves are also evolving, accelerated by the rise of agentic AI. Allianz’s Nemo automates high-volume, low-complexity claims workflows, while Travelers has launched a Voice AI Claims Assistant powered by OpenAI that gathers claim details dynamically and guides customers through the filing process end-to-end. Analysis suggests that while AI productivity tools will remain important, the next phase of AI adoption is likely to focus more on end-to-end deployments, tied to underwriting discipline, pricing accuracy, fraud detection, claims leakage, loss prevention, and portfolio management to drive long-term value.
Preece continues: “The growing role played by agentic systems means that insurers can connect multiple steps in a process – for tasks like first notice of loss, triaging, evidence assessment and policy checks – and make decisions that can dramatically reduce manual bottlenecks. It’s early days, but the leading insurers are increasingly putting use cases into production that help to reshape entire workflows, rather than creating isolated efficiencies.”
Be the first to comment