The Hartford's AI Push And Property Growth: What Insurance Pros Should Take Away
The Hartford Insurance Group (NYSE:HIG) laid out a clear plan at UBS: lean into AI, grow property with discipline, expand personal lines, and return excess capital. Chairman and CEO Chris Swift and CFO Beth Costello framed it as a multi-year, tech-enabled acceleration with a tight grip on margins.
If you work in underwriting, claims, distribution, or finance, here's the signal through the noise-and how it could influence your playbook through 2026.
Key Points
- AI rollout across productivity and end-to-end workflows; 6,000+ employees trained and licensed.
- Property underwriting at ~$3.3B today; targeted double-digit growth into 2026.
- Agency Prevail expanding from ~10 to 30 states by early 2027; push into small-business E&S binding (~10% growth next year).
- Margin discipline as property softens and liability pricing stays firm; excess capital to dividends and buybacks.
Strategic Priorities Through 2026
First, The Hartford is accelerating "tech-enabled, AI-enabled" capabilities to improve customer experience and augment employee output. That includes workflow redesign across underwriting, operations, and claims-not just tools bolted onto legacy processes.
Second, property growth is back in focus. With roughly $3.3B of property underwriting on the books, management sees a path to double-digit growth into 2026, skewed to small and middle market where results are holding up better than large accounts.
Third, Agency Prevail will move from about 10 states to 30 by early 2027, leaning on independent agent relationships from commercial lines. In group benefits, the plan is to defend a top-three spot while expanding absence management, plus a newer push to employers under 500 lives with dental, vision, and supplemental offerings via a partner.
How The Hartford Is Operationalizing AI
The company's AI push builds on modernized claims/admin platforms and ongoing data work (more to do into 2026). Two tracks are in motion: personal productivity and full workflow reinvention.
Productivity: 6,000+ employees have been trained and licensed on tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google's Notebook. Workflow: The Hartford is working with Google as a preferred partner on a roughly three-year roadmap to re-engineer underwriting, operations, and claims. The intent isn't broad layoffs-growth, retention, and customer experience come first-though productivity and operating leverage should improve as scale builds.
Early results are promising. Small commercial is already highly automated, with 75%+ of quotes processed "on the glass" without human touch. The bigger opportunity sits in middle market underwriting. In claims, AI is summarizing lengthy medical records (up to ~1,000 pages) in hours for workers' comp and disability, helping teams find covered events and next steps faster.
For context on the partner ecosystem behind efforts like this, see Google's enterprise AI offerings: Google Cloud AI.
Industry Outlook: The "Haves" And "Have-Nots" In AI
Swift expects carriers to split based on sustained investment and organizational bandwidth. The Hartford intends to be in the "have" camp, using AI to support above-market growth, share gains, and tighter agency relationships. For those that don't invest, he anticipates slow consolidation.
Pricing, Micro-Cycles, And Where Growth Still Works
Pricing has to be read against loss trends and competition. Management sees aggregate loss costs running modestly higher than price changes and is pushing underwriters to protect margins.
Property is softening fastest; liability pricing remains firm given high single-digit loss trends across several lines. The company views the market as micro-cycles: workers' comp, property, liability, specialty-each moving on its own cadence.
Property growth will emphasize small and middle market, less shared-and-layered and selective pullbacks in certain E&S and large property. The focus is on fire perils and measured, diversified catastrophe exposure.
Small Commercial And E&S: What To Watch
Workers' comp: some rate headwinds, but medical severities are behaving and frequency trends are favorable. In BOP, property rate increases are slowing as the book is now rate-adequate nationally, including improvements in California and the West. Liability trends remain elevated and will continue to drive pricing needs.
E&S binding for small business totals about $425M, with roughly $300M in property at year-end. The Hartford still expects ~10% growth next year and describes performance as profitable with distribution partners aligned to its risk appetite.
Personal Lines: Prevail Expansion And Regulatory Reality
Prevail will scale to 30 states by early 2027. The Hartford is leaning on home-first bundling, capacity for homeowners, improved roof scoring and imagery, stronger underwriting tools, and catastrophe management.
On regulation and affordability, management points to loss trends and inflation as core drivers of price. Florida and California serve as cautionary tales if price controls disrupt availability, though recent Florida reforms targeted underlying cost drivers.
Group Benefits: Performance And Focus
Group benefits fits the company's underwriting DNA and complements distribution. Guidance for after-tax margins of 6%-7% looks supported by lower-than-assumed incidence and stronger recoveries, with more people returning to work sooner than models expected.
Capital Deployment
The Hartford expects to grow faster than the market and gain share, while generating excess capital. Current preferred uses: dividend increases and share repurchases.
Operator Playbook: Practical Moves For Carriers, MGAs, And Brokers
- Budget for AI as a workflow change, not a point solution. Target underwriting, claims triage, and policy servicing where cycle time and leakage matter most.
- Level up middle market underwriting. Touchless small commercial is table stakes; mid-market is where efficiency and selection gains can move the combined ratio.
- Property: push small/middle market segmentation, be selective on shared-and-layered, and keep CAT diversified. Liability pricing needs to reflect high single-digit trends.
- Stand up document intelligence for claims (medical, legal, financial). Summarization and entity extraction can cut hours per file and tighten reserving earlier.
- Train your workforce at scale. 6,000+ licenses signals change management as a core competency, not an afterthought.
If you're building AI skills across underwriting, claims, or ops, this curated catalog can speed up team enablement: AI courses by leading platforms.
About The Hartford Insurance Group
The Hartford Financial Services Group is a U.S.-based insurer with core businesses in commercial and personal P&C, group benefits (life, disability, dental), and affiliated asset management. The company also provides risk management, claims handling, and loss prevention across industries. Founded in 1810 in Hartford, Connecticut, it is one of the oldest insurance organizations in the country.
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