AI and personalisation at scale: Changing customer engagement in insurance
Customer expectations keep rising. Price and cover still matter, but the experience now decides loyalty. Insurers are moving from transactional interactions to connected, AI-enabled engagement that treats every customer like an individual, not a policy number.
The goal is simple to say and hard to do: make every touchpoint feel relevant, timely and consistent - across digital and human channels - and do it for millions of customers in real time.
A global shift to individualised experiences
Across markets, leaders are pushing past segment-based journeys. Aviva is investing in AI-driven insights to personalise at the moment of need. Allstate is using machine learning to anticipate service requests and offers. In Asia, Ping An is embedding AI across its ecosystem to deliver context-aware engagement at scale.
The direction is clear: unified profiles, real-time decisioning, and orchestration that connects web, app, marketing, and the call centre experience into one conversation.
IAG's digital transformation: A case in point
Australia's IAG shows where the industry is heading. The insurer partnered with Adobe and invested in an enterprise retail platform to build what it calls a system of engagement - not just a system of record - that sits across channels and brands.
"It's a platform that allows us to improve and uplift the way we engage with our customers through our digital channels in particular, but also through our marketing channels," said Nandor Locher, IAG's executive general manager of digital business. "It's more a system of engagement rather than a system of record and builds on top of the enterprise platform that we have built."
Locher's point is the connective tissue. "It allows us to engage with our customers in a much more personalised way, really understanding their interaction behaviours across the different channels and start connecting those experiences across the different touchpoints right along the customer journey."
Connected experiences that actually work
The hard part isn't personalising one email or one page. It's doing it across every interaction - site, app, claims, billing, contact centre - and doing it for every individual, not just a cohort.
"This is a big step forward to really do this personalisation at scale across all touchpoints," said Locher. "It's highly automated and really down to an individual rather than just at the segment level."
This also changes the call centre experience. Agents see the context of the entire journey: what the customer clicked, what they tried to do, what they might need next. That enables service that feels seamless rather than repetitive.
"The big word is the connected experience where the different touchpoints in previous stages are providing context for the current conversation that a customer may be having," Locher said.
AI is baked into the stack. "AI is increasingly built into this platform and leveraging this - having a large-scale technology organization innovating in that space - allows us to focus on the insurance business and the customer engagement and leverage these capabilities," he said. The result: better real-time information that supports both growth and efficiency.
Integrated platforms vs best-of-breed
Every insurer is debating the stack. Do you piece together point solutions, or commit to an integrated platform? IAG chose the integrated route to reduce handoffs, speed activation, and keep data consistent across touchpoints.
There's no single right answer, but the trade-offs are consistent: speed of change, data quality, governance, and how fast teams can ship new experiences. Integrated platforms tend to reduce complexity; best-of-breed can win on specialised features if you have the engineering and data discipline to stitch it all together.
What insurers need in place
- Unified customer profiles with consent and identity resolution across brands and lines.
- Event-level data capture with near real-time availability for decisioning.
- Next-best-action and offer decisioning that uses business rules plus machine learning.
- Orchestration across web, app, email, SMS, paid media, and contact centre tooling.
- Agent assist with journey context, predicted intent, and recommended actions.
- Measurement frameworks: incrementality testing, attribution, and feedback loops to models.
- Governance: model monitoring, fairness checks, privacy controls, and audit trails.
Practical first moves
- Pick two journeys with clear value (e.g., quote-to-bind and first notice of loss) and redesign them for personalisation end to end.
- Stand up a unified profile and event stream that marketing, product, and service can all use.
- Start with rules + AI, not AI everywhere. Let humans override and learn from the outcomes.
- Give agents the same context your digital channels use - one view, live updates.
- Measure uplift per touchpoint and retire anything that doesn't move a metric that matters.
Tools and references
If you're exploring experience platforms, see Adobe's approach to real-time profiles and decisioning in the Adobe Experience Platform. For a broader view on personalisation at scale, this McKinsey overview outlines common value pools and pitfalls.
Building team capability is often the bottleneck. For role-based upskilling on AI tools and workflows, see Complete AI Training: Courses by job.
The takeaway
Personalisation at scale is becoming the default. Insurers that connect data, decisioning, and delivery across every channel - and let AI inform, not dictate - will win on relevance, cost to serve, and lifetime value. The rest will be stuck fixing the same journey gaps, one campaign at a time.
Your membership also unlocks:
