PwC: Insurance Execs Say Agentic AI Leading Industry Transformation

More than half of insurance executives say generative and agentic artificial intelligence are the technological investments that will have the most transformative impact on the industry over the next three years, according to PwC.

The professional services firm noted in a recent report that 54% of 136 surveyed insurance execs view AI as most poised to reshape the industry during that period. This was 22 points higher than the next most popular option.

Accordingly, surveyed leaders report near-term plans to heavily invest in the technology. A total of 57% of insurance executives listed both generative and agentic AI as top tech investment priorities for 2026.

In an interview, Marie Carr, PwC’s global growth strategy leader, said insurers have been exploring pilots and use cases across their functional value chain.

“Efficiency isn’t just ‘How do I reduce headcount?'” she said. “Efficiency is reducing cycle time. How quickly can I get a quote to a broker who has an opportunity? If I can do that in 10 minutes versus 10 hours or 10 days, all of those things become ways in which we compress, and we’re way more efficient.”

And while there has been speculation that AI will do away with advisors, PwC said in its report that, at least for the time being, that seems unlikely. The firm shared it sees AI helping and augmenting advisors, noting that “assessing and managing larger risks requires an understanding of nuance and a level of assurance that people still most effectively provide.”

“While AI is indeed changing ways of working—notably by automating and therefore simplifying (if not outright replacing) many operational processes and applications— brokers and agents continue to play a vital role in placing coverage,” PwC said in its report.

This shift away from time-intensive tasks will enable insurers and brokers to focus more on problem solving related to the nature and complexity of risk, Carr said. The top brokers, agents and MGAs will bring more powerful solutions to the market and partner with carriers in different kinds of ways, she added.

“The reason why the advisor and the broker stays in the loop is because now, the advisor and the broker will probably let go of the things that aren’t value-added but focus on the things that are,” Carr said.

Notably, nearly all the insurance execs PwC surveyed (92%) said that “financial services firms need to become technology companies that happen to offer financial products, rather than financial companies that use technology.”

Carr described how the traditional IT model could be reshaped to meet this need. Instead of relegating IT staff to coding, she described an approach that places IT pros in closer proximity to other employees, so ideas are developed and created together.

“So that it becomes left brain, right brain,” she said. “As opposed to business, then IT. We go hand in glove together.”

In the report, PwC said it is seeing the establishment of in-house teams and labs to prioritize and manage enterprise-wide experimentation. This includes IT teams being “solution designers” that work collaboratively with the business to implement scalable solutions.

The firm shared it is also seeing the embedding of dynamic business rules by migrating existing robotic process automation (RPA) to agentic AI, prioritizing development or acquisition of new skills and moving from a build to sourcing strategy, for example, by acquiring insurtech companies with desired capabilities.

Carr said that when executives say their organizations must become more technology focused, “it’s not that [they’re] suddenly trying to be a tech company. It’s that they want to remove the barriers and make technology and business permeable—wholly permeable with each other—so that [they] can be faster and more intimate.”

Topics InsurTech Agencies Data Driven Artificial Intelligence