Some property/casualty insurers talk about experimenting with artificial intelligence to automate call center responses and back-office operations. But that’s not the road to turbocharging growth that AIG CEO Peter Zaffino envisions for his company.
Executive Summary
Imagine underwriters arrive at their desk to find that all their submissions have been ingested, reviewed and prioritized. That's a reality for a group of underwriters working on private and not-for-profit business at AIG, according to the CEO and CDO, who both described how a Generative AI solution—AIG Underwriter Assistance—was designed and launched to "turbocharge" the insurer's growth in specialty business. Leaders of technology partners Anthropic and Palantir were also on hand at AIG's Investor Day last month to laud the insurer's progress leveraging AI in a core part of the business.AIG is all-in on AI that is directly focused on its core activities—underwriting and claims, Zaffino and Claude Wade, executive vice president and chief digital officer, told analysts during a four-hour Investor Day event late last month.
“We’re focusing on this as an end-to-end process—not on the fringes, [and] not just for expense savings,” said Zaffino, setting up a discussion of what the two AIG executives described as a strong “agentic AI ecosystem” where AI agent tasks involve data ingestion on one end of the underwriting process, all the way to figuring the propensity to bind on the other.
The ecosystem, which involves partnerships between AIG and well-known technology companies Anthropic and Palantir, will help AIG underwriters get through 500,000-plus E&S submissions to book at least $4 billion in new business premiums in the year 2030, Zaffino projects. Already, AI tools that are up and running in financial lines allow AIG to review 100 percent of every private and non-profit business submission that comes in, without adding underwriters, Wade said.
