The insurance industry has a professional relationship with risk that is unlike almost any other. It quantifies uncertainty for a living. So it is perhaps fitting that the most sweeping moral intervention in the AI employment debate — Pope Leo XIV's 42,300-word encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released on 25 May 2026 — addresses, with unusual precision, exactly the risks that insurance carriers, brokers and their workforces are currently navigating.
The document, signed by the first American pope on the 135th anniversary of the landmark labour encyclical Rerum Novarum, calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility" in the governance of AI. It condemns the concentration of AI power in private hands, warns of the de-skilling of workers, and insists that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs."
For insurance industry HR and people leaders, these are not abstract moral questions. They are operational ones.
Insurance Business has tracked the data closely: a Q1 2026 Insurance Labour Market Study conducted by The Jacobson Group and the benchmarking division of Aon's Strategy and Technology Group found that job openings in finance and insurance fell to their lowest monthly level in a decade by December 2025 — dropping from an annual average of 281,000 openings to roughly 138,000 in a single month. Automation and process improvement were cited as the most common reasons for planned staff reductions.
As Insurance Business has reported, roles in financial reporting, data synthesis and aggregation are among those most likely to be displaced by AI, with call centres, data entry and transactional operations facing "some of the greatest displacement risk." These are not entry-level roles for young workers starting careers in the industry — they are the mid-tier operational backbone that has sustained carriers and brokers for generations.
Against this backdrop, Accenture has found that 90 per cent of insurance executives intend to invest more in AI in 2026, with 85 per cent viewing it primarily as a revenue and growth driver. Ambition, as Insurance Business has observed, is running well ahead of execution — yet hiring decisions are already being made as though the automation were complete.
Leo's encyclical does not use the language of actuarial tables or combined ratios, but its analytical framework is one that insurance professionals will recognise. The Pope asks, in essence: who bears the risk, and who benefits from the gain?
His answer, grounded in Catholic social teaching but broadly accessible to any reader, is that when the gains of technological transformation accrue to capital while the risks are borne by workers and communities, the result is a moral failure as well as an economic one. "The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity," he writes, describing the dynamic by which algorithmic systems can perpetuate injustice while appearing merely neutral.
For insurance HR professionals responsible for workforce planning during a period of structural transformation, that is not an esoteric observation. It is a description of the reputational and institutional risk that comes from handling AI-driven restructuring poorly — from being the kind of organisation that later has to apologise for the human cost of decisions that seemed, at the time, merely technical.
The most forward-thinking voices in the insurance industry are already moving toward the framework the Pope advocates. Insurance Business has reported on the concept of the "bionic" workforce — human experts supercharged by data, rather than replaced by algorithms. Christopher Frankland, founder of InsurTech360, argues that the industry's fixation on total automation "often misses the nuance of actual insurance work." The goal, he argues, is not to replace human judgment but to free it from manual processing so it can focus on empathy, complexity and decision-making.
Insurance Business has also noted that the CEO Voices Report 2026 from Sollers Consulting found global insurance chiefs increasingly see AI as a catalyst for rebalancing — rather than replacing — the role of people in the industry. Human judgment, empathy and strategic decision-making are set to become more important alongside automation, not less.
Leo XIV would find little to quarrel with in this framing. His encyclical explicitly allows that "it is certainly desirable for technology to relieve humans of arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity." The constraint is that "the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule."
Christopher Olah of Anthropic, who appeared alongside the Pope at the Vatican, was unusually candid about the constraints his own industry operates under. Every frontier AI lab, he said, including Anthropic, "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." His appeal to those outside the industry was precise: "If we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives — people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend." In the insurance industry, the HR and people function is well placed to be exactly that voice.
For more on how the insurance industry is navigating the intersection of AI and workforce strategy, visit https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/au/news/technology/
