AI Tops 2025 Priorities for Global Insurers, Overtaking Inflation

AI Overtakes Inflation as the Top Priority for Insurance Leaders in 2025

Artificial intelligence is now the industry's top priority, according to the International Insurance Society's 2025 Global Priorities Survey of nearly 20,000 insurance executives. The study spans six categories: Economic, Political and Legal, Social and Environmental, Operational, Technology and Innovation, and Business and Financial.

Two-thirds of executives now cite AI as their leading technology and innovation focus, up from 17% in 2021. The driver is clear: AI is expected to streamline operations, sharpen analytics, and open new product pathways.

Key Signals From the Survey

• AI moves to #1: The most important industry priority, displacing inflation for the first time in three years.
• Operational efficiency holds: Still the top operational focus, supported by modernization and AI investment.
• Cybersecurity stays critical: Remains the leading political and legal concern, with a modest easing in urgency.
• Inflation pressure persists: The highest economic concern for a fourth year; 63% rank it in their top three issues.
• Climate risk leads socially and environmentally: The gap with technological advancement is narrowing as digital strategies move to center stage.
• Growth outlook: Product innovation and new customer acquisition are the top opportunities for 2025.

What This Means for Insurance Executives

AI isn't a side project anymore. It's the operating system for growth, efficiency, and risk selection. The focus now shifts from exploration to repeatable use cases with measurable ROI.

Priority Use Cases That Pay Off

• Underwriting augmentation: Pre-fill, risk scoring, and submission triage to speed cycle times and improve hit ratios.
• Claims automation: First Notice of Loss intake, document extraction, liability assessment support, and fraud signals to lower loss adjustment expense and leakage.
• Pricing and portfolio analytics: Faster scenario testing, granular segmentation, and early signal detection for rate adequacy.
• Distribution productivity: Producer enablement, quote-bind-close nudges, and content automation to reduce acquisition cost.
• Servicing and retention: Proactive outreach, sentiment and lapse risk scoring, and smarter self-service.

Execution Checklist for 2025

• Define a 12-18 month AI roadmap: 5-7 use cases, owners, milestones, and a simple benefits model tied to combined ratio or new business growth.
• Clean, governed data: Prioritize the datasets that feed underwriting, claims, and fraud models; standardize taxonomies and lineage.
• Model risk and compliance: Establish approval gates, testing, monitoring, and documentation aligned to an AI risk framework. See the NIST AI RMF for structure here.
• Cybersecurity uplift: Secure model endpoints, API gateways, and prompts; implement least privilege and data loss prevention for AI-enabled workflows.
• Human-in-the-loop controls: Define clear review thresholds for underwriting and claims decisions; log rationale for auditability.
• Change management and skills: Upskill underwriters, claims adjusters, actuaries, and product teams to work with AI tools and interpret outputs.
• Measure relentlessly: Track cycle time, hit/bind rates, loss ratio impact, leakage reduction, and customer satisfaction.

Context Across Priority Categories

Economic: Inflation remains the top macro pressure, with 63% placing it in their top three. Rate adequacy, expense discipline, and portfolio rebalancing stay essential while AI-driven efficiency helps protect margins.

Political and Legal: Cybersecurity is still the leading concern. Expect continued scrutiny on data privacy, model transparency, and third-party risk across your AI stack.

Social and Environmental: Climate risk holds the lead. The gap with tech priorities is narrowing as carriers build digital and data capabilities that feed climate models, pricing, and exposure management.

Operational: Efficiency remains the anchor. Modernization plus AI is now the default path to lower unit cost and faster time to quote, pay, and service.

Technology and Innovation: AI is the growth engine. The imperative is disciplined delivery, not experimentation for its own sake.

Growth: Where to Place Your Bets

• New products: Parametric structures, micro-covers, and embedded offerings where data advantage is real.
• Customer acquisition: Precision targeting, improved submission quality, and responsive pricing guided by live signals.
• Mid-market and specialty: Use AI to wring friction out of submissions and reduce underwriting drift.

What's Next

The Global Priorities Survey will fuel discussion at the IIS Global Insurance Forum 2025, Oct. 26-27, at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. Details and registration are available here.

Level Up Team Capabilities

If you're building skills across underwriting, claims, actuarial, and product teams, explore curated AI learning paths by role here.