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.
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% of every private and non-profit business submission that comes in, without adding underwriters, Wade said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Palantir CEO Alex Karp praised Zaffino’s vision and leadership of AI initiatives for the insurer’s core activities of underwriting—already live for private and non-profit financial lines business, and in the works for claims processing—as they joined the AIG leader on stage for a half-hour panel discussion during the three-and-a-half-hour Investor Day event.
“Enterprises are having a lot of success deploying [AI] in the periphery,” said Amodei. “That’s common across all companies. All companies need customer service. They need internal productivity for their developers. That’s the same whether you’re in insurance or some other area. So, [there’s] a lot of success there, and a lot of aspiration to make progress in the core of what they do.”
Rather than experimenting with pilots, AIG has moved past aspirational goals, leaning into the core use cases, Amodei said. AIG “really had conviction on the claims cases and the underwriting cases, and has moved quickly to get a lot of this unstructured data [into the process] and really, really bet with conviction,” he said, noting that AIG started working with Anthropic when it’s AI Assistance Claude was Claude Version 2.1.
While AIG is now using Claude 3.5, it’s not a stronger AI model that is driving underwriting success for the carrier, Amodei said. “The technology can be great, but if there isn’t that conviction, if there isn’t that will to move quickly and that focus, it doesn’t happen,” he said.
“The real differentiator is not in the technology, as fast as that’s improving, but finding ways to deploy it in enterprises, finding ways to revolutionize an existing business,” Amodei said.
Palantir’s Karp also lauded Zaffino for starting to build the AI ecosystem ahead of the curve with a “singular and somewhat prescient focus” on that revolution of core business activities. Later, CNBC Analyst Sarah Eisen, who moderated the panel, asked Karp to talk specifically about what he had learned about AI applications for insurance.
