A few weeks ago, members of the European insurance industry gathered in London to take part in Insurtech Insights Europe 2025, the largest conference focused on insurtech in Europe. This year’s keynote topics were no surprise: Artificial intelligence (AI), automation and seamless experiences took center stage.
We were thrilled to join our colleagues at this insightful event and have the opportunity to attend numerous sessions on how technology is fueling change across the value chain, to network with like-minded innovators and get to know emerging technology platforms.
Across the busy two-day agenda, five key themes emerged for us that insurers should keep an eye on.
Focus on how to use AI, not if.
There’s no question that AI has dominated the conversation in insurtech spheres for the last few years. But insurance carriers are finally starting to see concrete results from their AI proofs of concept, and organisations that don’t invest in innovation are bound to fall behind.
Enterprises must now prioritise identifying not whether they should use AI, but how they can leverage AI tools to solve high-impact business problems to augment their value creation across areas such as loss prevention and customer retention. Leading insurers are already extracting a return on investment across multiple applications of AI.
- Don’t make perfect the enemy of good.
Demonstrate the value of innovative initiatives iteratively, with compliance, security and privacy guardrails built into the project to ensure that risk is mitigated from the outset. Beginning with iterative value generation enables insurers to fine-tune new technology’s potential across the organisation.
For example, applying AI to serve as a co-pilot for agents to have a more impactful conversation for customer retention is a low-cost, low-effort first application for AI that can then be applied in other parts of the value chain. Once a use case has started to show value in one area, enterprises can dive in deep to ensure high-quality results across multiple use cases, from better risk selection to capital management to improved exposure management.
- Invest in a flexible enterprise architecture.
Making any upgrades or changes to a system requires insurers to have a robust foundation that can support innovative initiatives. Technical debt can take months or even years to address; the best way to pave a path for enhancing an enterprise’s capabilities is to ensure that the architecture supporting the organisation is able to withstand changes as they emerge.
Whether it’s a modern, off-the-shelf core platform with pre-built integrations or a custom engineered solution that’s purpose-built for a particular insurer, the underlying systems that power an organisation need to be capable of adapting to new technology.
- Prioritise data quality.
One standout success factor across any change initiative was having good quality data and a modern data infrastructure to support it. For any new technology to be effective, data maturity is paramount. Insurance organisations need to invest in their data capabilities as a foundational priority before embarking on any type of modernisation or innovation initiative.
This means not only having good data storage and analytics, but breaking down data silos, ensuring the organisation has good data hygiene and hiring the right talent to derive the most insights from data stores. In addition, strong data governance practices are necessary to ensure that the organisation is meeting all regulatory and compliance measures.
- Cultivate a disruption mindset.
While new technology is constantly emerging, insurers should build a culture that encourages continuous education. Not every technology will have a use case at every organisation. This disruption mindset must include change management to educate every department on how AI and other innovative technologies can help them do their jobs better, not to replace them.
On top of educating individuals, enterprises need to stay up to date on the latest trends to separate the hype from the truly valuable investments that can lead to successful innovation. Identifying key use cases to test out iteratively will help confirm if a technology is a good fit for the organisation’s needs.
Technology has always been a lever for driving value in the insurance industry, but that may be truer now than ever before. As insurers continue to explore ways to innovate and differentiate themselves in a busy marketplace, it’s clear that there are best practices to keep in mind. We look forward to seeing what the year ahead has in store for insurtech and to attending next year’s Insurtech Insights Europe.
To learn more about how to drive growth by investing in innovative technology, read our whitepaper The Insurer’s Generative AI Handbook.
