Why legacy insurers are stuck in a productivity rut — and how embedding AI across core operations can reignite growth, reduce costs and transform customer-service delivery.
Highlights:
Many insurers have improved efficiency significantly — but now face a productivity plateau that standard cost-cuts alone cannot overcome.
Artificial intelligence offers a path beyond incremental efficiency: by automating complex workflows, enabling data-driven decisions and redesigning end-to-end processes across underwriting, claims and customer service.
To unlock the next productivity wave, insurers must combine technology with business-model change: embed AI in operating models, reskill workforces and reimagine roles around human-machine collaboration.
Summary :
Insurers have made strides in automation and digitalisation — yet many find themselves stuck on a plateau, where further gains in productivity become harder despite continuing investment. The core issue isn’t the absence of tools, but the challenge of scaling them and re-thinking how work gets done.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI): not simply as a point solution, but as a force that can trigger the next wave of productivity. By applying AI to high-volume and high-complexity functions — for example triaging claims, underwriting using unstructured data or automating routine customer interactions — insurers can leap past “good enough” efficiency and start unlocking deeper value.
However, gaining that leap requires more than algorithms. Insurers must integrate AI into the fabric of their operating model — aligning people, processes and incentives, redefining roles to focus humans on judgement and relationships, and building scalable AI-platform capabilities. When these elements come together, the result is a transformed insurer: faster, leaner, more responsive, and ready for the future.
