The evidence: source quotes behind the claims

"SME underwriting is characterized by maximum automation and speed, with algorithms handling the bulk of simple risks and humans intervening regarding exceptions. Large corporate underwriting sits at the opposite end, marked by bespoke, slow and expert-driven processes to capture unique risks."

"However, even today 30–40% of underwriter time is often administrative, creating significant automation opportunities."

"We chose this line of business because it involves a considerable amount of manual data extraction and analysis ... AI technology, deployed in the right way, has the potential to remove manual tasks from our specialist underwriters, freeing them up to focus on more complex risks where human expertise and analysis are a must."

"At Arch, the intake-to-decisioning cycle time was running two to three days. That stretched quote turnaround times to three to four days."

"AIG's Lexington Insurance unit processed over 370,000 E&S submissions in 2025 ... 2X–5X faster end-to-end underwriting across commercial lines ... 1 underwriter now handles the workload of 5."

"...it has helped deliver a 30% increase in quoted submissions, reduced time to quote for underwriters by 55%, and increased binding of submissions by approximately 40%."

"Expense ratio improved to 31.1%, down 90 basis points year-over-year, with management reaffirming a sub-30% target by 2027."

"113% uplift in underwriting productivity (GWP per FTE), effectively more than doubling output per underwriter without proportional headcount growth."

"Quote turnaround time for strategic broker partners reduced from 24 hours to 2 hours."

"Zurich is scaling AI-powered risk digitization across 20+ markets within the first 16 months, reducing manual processing time by over 80% ..."

"Proven at scale across seven countries and two major lines of business, processing complex, multi-language submissions with 95%+ accuracy."

"Chubb told investors in April 2026 that nine to ten AI and digital transformation projects would deliver 150 basis points of run-rate combined ratio savings over three to four years (Chubb Q1 2026 earnings call, April 22, 2026) ..."

"The company targets 85% automation of its major underwriting and claims processes, expects roughly 70% of the organization to be touched by the transformation within three years ..."

"...the launch of Lane Assist, a world first pilot of agentic underwriting in specialty insurance that takes a submission from email through to quote recommendation in seconds."

"Believed to be a world first in specialty insurance, Lane Assist is designed to increase the proportion of submissions handled on a low touch basis ..."

"...compressed specialty quote turnaround from three days to approximately three minutes in production. That is a 99.4% reduction in cycle time for sabotage and terrorism insurance renewals, delivered not as a proof of concept but as a live operational system processing real broker submissions through WTW."

"Traditionally, this required actuaries to manually parse hundreds of rates over several weeks. Now, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) can autonomously reverse-engineer regulatory rate filings in a fraction of the time."

"The Actuarial Agent will support a range of targeted use cases designed to augment the expertise of Aviva's underwriters and brokers, such as enhancing pricing tools with new insights and optimising existing model code."

"Draft or update pricing models in natural language, and the agent generates schemas, rating logic, user interface components, and parameter tables with domain accuracy."

"This research project will examine how autonomous, goal-driven AI agents can transform traditional actuarial processes including data extraction, financial modeling, reserve analysis, pricing, valuation, regulatory compliance, and risk assessment."

"...customers using its technology have recorded substantial operational improvements, including processing times reduced by between 50% and 97%, increases in hit ratios of at least 15% and growth in gross written premium per underwriter of up to 30%."

"Our research found that for casualty claims with attorney involvement, the average indemnity costs are 390% higher than for unrepresented claims ($77,807 vs. $15,936). Claim duration is 295% higher."

"This led us to create Agent Skills: organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and load dynamically to perform better at specific tasks."

"Instead of building fragmented, custom-designed agents for each use case, anyone can now specialize their agents with composable capabilities by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge."

"However, compaction isn't sufficient. Out of the box, even a frontier coding model ... running ... in a loop across multiple context windows will fall short ... if it's only given a high-level prompt."

"The task often terminates upon completion, but it's also common to include stopping conditions (such as a maximum number of iterations) to maintain control."

"We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months."

"...current models have almost 100% success rate on tasks taking humans less than 4 minutes, but succeed <10% of the time on tasks taking more than around 4 hours."

"The probability that rapid transformation arrives broadly as the scenario describes it, by the July 2028 window in which it is meant to have resolved, is about 12%. The likeliest outcome, at roughly 64%, is a mixed-speed future in which frontier capability and capital keep more or less to the AI 2027 trajectory while the institutions that were supposed to be transformed by it carry on much as before."

"On agents, the specific mechanism the scenario depends on, 78% of enterprises are running pilots and 14% have scaled one."

"For the first time, real-time appetite information within the agency's preferred rating solution has emerged as the leading deciding factor agencies consider when choosing carrier and MGA partners — cited by 29% of respondents, jumping up from 12% in 2024."

"We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution."

"(Added Nov 22 2025, to prevent misunderstandings: we don't know exactly when AGI will be built. 2027 was our modal (most likely) year at the time of publication, our medians were somewhat longer.)"