Artificial intelligence technology has continued to evolve, and it’s affecting many areas of insurance from claims to underwriting to customer service, according to panelists at the 2025 PLUS D&O Symposium in New York City.
But has the technology developed so much that it could replace human underwriting in the next five years?
“I think it is the biggest question out there,” said Jeffrey Chivers, CEO and co-founder of Syllo, an AI-powered litigation workspace that enables lawyers and paralegals to use language models throughout the litigation life cycle.
Another way of asking this question is whether AI can develop judgment–not just in underwriting but across all business domains in which judgment is an essential part of the job, he said.
“Is there any change here with respect to a model’s ability to exercise the kind of nuanced value judgment and other types of judgments that go into a mission-critical job?” he asked. “Thus far, the answer for me has been no,” he said. “If the answer is yes at some time in the next five years, I think that’s what changes everything.”
Claire Davey, head of product innovation at Relm Insurance, said that major shifts are already happening in other areas of insurance that involve more administrative tasks, however.
“It depends on how the organization wants to deploy [AI] and utilize it,” she said. “But I think many jobs, particularly those that are administrative, are at risk of being phenomenally changed by artificial intelligence technology. It is going to be a landmark shift in commerce that we’ve seen in a generation, and insurance is no different.”
That said, Davey agreed that underwriting jobs are safe–for now.
“One of the key governance controls and duties with AI technology is that it does require human oversight, so while AI could perform some underwriting stages, you would hope that there is still a human reviewing its output and sense-checking that,” she said.
AI’s Underwriting Judgment
AI technology is having a material impact on the insurance industry in other ways, panelists agreed. To start, the litigation landscape is already seeing a transformation.
Within five years, there will be a lot more adoption of generative AI across legal and compliance functions, Chivers predicted. “And I think five years from now, a couple of things will be really prominent.”
He said much debate will continue to emerge around transparency and any red flags discovered within an organization due to AI.
