Most insurance pros have GenAI investment plans in 2025
SAS survey: Sixty-eight percent of insurance decision-makers use GenAI at least once every week.
The insurance industry is going all in on AI, according to an SAS survey.
Eighty-nine percent of insurance decision-makers said they were planning to invest in GenAI in 2025, the data showed, with 92% of that number having dedicated budgets already in place.
“Insurance is a notoriously slow-moving industry, but insurers are proving to be GenAI trailblazers, showing remarkable GenAI investment and excitement,” said Franklin Manchester, SAS principal global insurance advisor. “We’re not looking at an AI bubble set to burst, and that’s a good thing — but it’s clear that the insurance sector, like other industries, has obstacles to overcome.”
Top three industry goals for investing in GenAI, according to the survey include:
- Improvement in customer satisfaction and retention (81%).
- Reduction in operational costs and time savings (76%).
- Enhanced risk management and compliance measures (72%).
Meanwhile, 68% of insurance professionals from the survey reported using some form of GenAI in their professional roles at least once a week, with 22% saying they use the technology daily.
Only 11% of respondents said their organization had fully implemented GenAI, the data showed, while another 49% said they were already in the process of implementing the technology.
“GenAI is not a silver bullet, but insurers are finding it can provide many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, including in areas that have previously proven quite difficult, like the ingestion of unstructured data,” said Joe Rowe, data and AI insurance lead for UK, Ireland and Africa at Accenture. “Claims and underwriting are prime examples where GenAI is helping the human in the loop extract insights and make better decisions.”
Other key insights from the SAS survey include:
- Five percent of insurance respondents described their organization’s GenAI governance framework as “well-established and comprehensive.”
- Fifty-seven percent reported their organization’s frameworks were “in development.”
- Twenty-seven percent called their organization’s frameworks “ad hoc or informal.”
- Eleven percent said their ethical frameworks were “nonexistent.”
Rowe said the use of GenAI is progressing quite rapidly, but to develop it responsibly, “insurers must have an alignment of people, processes and technology, all working together to drive use cases from experimentation into operations and production.”
“Proper governance requires focus and investment,” he added.
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