Agentic AI has quickly become one of the most talked-about concepts in insurance. But beyond the hype, insurers want clarity: What is it really? Why does it matter? And where is the value?
In our joint webinar with Microsoft, Owen Greenwood (Dufrain), Fraser Black (Dufrain) and Jamie Taylor (Microsoft) broke down exactly what agentic AI is and the tangible opportunities it creates across underwriting, pricing, claims, distribution and capital management.
Here is a summary from the webinar. You can watch it in full here.
Agentic AI: the next evolution of automation
Owen, our Insurance expert, explains in the session, agentic AI refers to systems that can autonomously execute multi-step workflows with minimal human input, going beyond simply “answering questions” to actually doing the work.
Agentic systems can:
- Pull data from multiple systems
- Reason and make context-aware decisions
- Automate parts of complex workflows
- Execute actions end-to-end
For an industry built on process heavy workflows, documents and judgment-driven decisions, this shift is powerful.
Why insurance is primed for agentic AI
Across the market, insurers are trialling agents in areas including:
- Product and proposition design
- Underwriting
- Pricing
- Distribution and marketing
- Portfolio risk management
In our webinar, Owen and Fraser focused on the biggest near-term win: underwriting a workflow rich with documents, submissions, risk assessments and repeatable tasks that agents can accelerate.
The reality: ambition is high, but execution is hard
Jamie shared what Microsoft is seeing across financial services:
- Organisations have mastered first-phase GenAI (e.g. chat-based RAG solutions)
- Simple agents are already in production
- Complex, multi-step agents get stuck at PoC phase
- Many teams struggle to identify value-led use cases
- Technical challenges include tool integration, interoperability and scalability constraints
Jamie explains – “The demand is strong, but most insurers are stuck between ambition and execution knowing they need to move, but unsure how to build something robust and enterprise-ready”.
The message was clear: agentic AI is here and insurers who move now will gain the advantage.
Agentic AI is not about replacing decision-makers. It’s about augmenting underwriting capacity, reducing cycle times, improving submission quality insight, and enabling faster responses in competitive markets, while keeping humans firmly in control and in the loop.
This is the moment for insurers to step forward.
This is the moment for insurers to step forward.
We’ll be sharing more information about the webinars in our upcoming blogs, follow us on LinkedIn for more, here.
Recap and watch our recent webinar and see AI in action in our demo: Insurance Gets Agentic Webinar – Dufrain