2026 Executive Outlook | Laura Doddington, WTW

You can’t talk about insurance industry trends in 2025 without talking about artificial intelligence (AI). But when it comes to the application of AI, what we’ll see in 2026 will be fundamentally different than what came before.

Two or three years ago, AI was a shiny new toy featuring all the hype that comes with technological breakthroughs. Generative AI had arrived, and people were excited. It was clear AI would revolutionize the industry but it wasn’t clear how.

This past year, insurers got serious about experimenting with AI, although those efforts often lacked discipline and plans for scaling. Many efforts remained in laboratory settings rather than being embedded into core business functions. As insurers started grappling with the challenges inherent in deploying AI, disillusionment began to emerge in some quarters.

AI will mature in 2026. The focus will be on delivering genuine use cases for the technology to drive real business value. We’ll see a significant increase in the number of areas in which AI is improving results across claims, operations, and underwriting. AI will also create material efficiencies in functional departments, including in actuarial, human resources and distribution.

As the range of use cases expands, success will hinge less on building models and more on executing and scaling AI across an organization. Insurers will focus on what it means to scale effectively, including the architecture, systems, and data strategy critical for success. We will see an increased focus on governance, as insurers look to blend the inherently unpredictable outcomes of AI with the need for deterministic processes in the highly regulated insurance industry.

Given the specialized nature of the insurance industry, we will see the adoption of bespoke AI applications to meet insurance-specific needs. There will be an increase in the use of agentic AI systems, which can achieve their goals with less human intervention, to solve very specific tasks. Also, there will be a focus on the ecosystem required to enable AI agents to successfully collaborate with humans and each other.

Next year will mark a turning point in determining what AI means for our workforce. Organizations will better define the skills needed to be successful in the future, as well as clarify the training and education required for the industry’s more junior team members. Ultimately, 2026 will be the year insurers move from experimenting with AI to realizing its full potential.