For two years, the insurance industry has been laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence. The question now dividing the market is harder, and more consequential: is any of it translating into competitive advantage?
That is the central question of the Evident AI Index for Insurance, a June 2026 benchmarking report published by intelligence firm Evident Insights that tracks AI maturity across 30 of the world's largest insurers. Its second annual edition delivers a verdict that will be reassuring to a handful of carriers and clarifying, in a sobering sense, to the rest: the gap between the leaders and the sector's mid-table is not narrowing. It is hardening.
Allianz has overtaken AXA to claim first place in the 2026 rankings, driven by broad-based improvement across the Index's four measurement pillars - Talent, Innovation, Leadership, and Transparency. AXA holds second, with Manulife at third, Zurich - the Index's biggest mover - rising to fourth, and Liberty Mutual at fifth. Among European carriers, Generali climbs to second place in the Leadership pillar, becoming one of only three insurers globally to disclose a quantified AI return on investment at group level.
The results arrive as the industry contends with the next wave of pressure. Claims typically account for 60% to 80% of premium income. P&C insurers are navigating a more volatile risk environment shaped by climate, cyber, social inflation, and geopolitical instability. Life insurers face weaker long-term premium growth and a generation of customers with fundamentally different product expectations. Reinsurers are absorbing rising loss activity while defending underwriting margins in a softening market. Against that backdrop, the Evident analysis frames AI not as an operational nicety but as a financial lever - one that the leaders are now beginning to pull.
The 2026 Index introduces something its predecessor could not: trajectory. With two years of comparable data, it is now possible to track not just where insurers stand but how quickly they are moving.
The leaders are moving faster. Allianz's position at the top of the rankings rests on a talent base that is approximately 28% larger than AXA's in AI-specific roles, an enterprise-wide training programme that reached more than 150,000 employees across 70 countries through its AI Run initiative, and a Research and Patents ranking that climbed from fourth to first over 12 months. The company has registered more than 900 AI use cases worldwide spanning underwriting, claims, fraud detection, and customer service.
Its most advanced deployment, the Nemo platform, illustrates where the frontier is moving. Launched in November 2025, Nemo is a coordinated system of seven specialised AI agents that handles food spoilage claims from a customer photograph through to settlement. Separate agents verify storm data, check policy coverage, assess fraud risk, execute payment, and log decisions for regulatory compliance - with a human reviewer authorising the final payout. The platform operates without the hand-offs and manual intervention that define most claims workflows.
AXA's second-place ranking reflects Allianz moving faster rather than AXA falling back, as the Index notes. AXA continues to lead in responsible AI research and academic partnerships, and its CEO has publicly aligned AI with the company's Unlock the Future growth strategy.
Across 65 publicly disclosed AI use cases with reported outcomes, the overall picture is one of a sector still early in its maturity curve. Productivity gains appear in 75% of those cases. Revenue uplift appears in 2%. Claims management accounts for 28% of deployments, internal process operations 20%, and underwriting and pricing 17%.
The Index describes this concentration as a structural choice as much as a capability gap. These are the workflows where outcomes can be defined, baselines set, and improvements measured with relative speed. The commercially larger opportunity - improving the quality of underwriting decisions, pricing accuracy, fraud detection, and claims adjudication - is where the Index identifies the next phase of competition.
Only 8% of disclosed use cases currently show AI improving decision quality across connected end-to-end workflows. But that share is rising, and it is concentrated almost entirely among the top-10 insurers. Forty-nine per cent of disclosed use cases remain point solutions delivering efficiency gains within a single activity - a starting point, the Index suggests, rather than a destination.
The most striking individual movement in the 2026 rankings is Zurich's climb of eight places, from 12th to fourth - the largest year-on-year improvement of any insurer. Its advance was led by talent growth across all AI capability categories, with AI Development roles now comprising 44% of its AI talent base.
Central to Zurich's progress is ZurichIQ, a modular generative AI platform deployed across multiple markets and embedded in claims, underwriting, legal, and employee productivity functions. The suite includes AgentIQ for agents and brokers, PolicyIQ and ProgramIQ for policy wording and comparison, GuidelineIQ for underwriting adherence, ClaimsIQ for coverage and fraud detection, and VoiceIQ for service centre performance.
One of the 2026 Index's sharper observations concerns the relationship between governance and deployment velocity. Among AI-mature insurers, investment in Responsible AI has increasingly shifted from a compliance exercise to what the Index describes as a deployment enabler. Established governance frameworks and model validation standards create reusable guardrails that reduce the time required to approve and scale new use cases.
That framing has practical relevance across every jurisdiction covered by the Index. In the United States, 23 states and Washington, D.C. have adopted the NAIC's model bulletin on AI use in insurance, and the New York Department of Financial Services enacted Circular Letter No. 7 requiring carriers to explain how AI factors into underwriting and pricing decisions. In Europe, the EU AI Act has placed regulated AI use in insurance under obligations for transparency and human oversight that will intensify through 2027. Zurich ranks third in Transparency in the 2026 Index, up one place, supported by customer-facing responsible AI pledges and a formal risk and investment committee with oversight of AI risk management.
Allianz's partnership with Anthropic, announced in January 2026, takes the governance argument further still. Rather than focusing solely on productivity, the partnership is building a traceability and compliance system designed to log AI-driven decisions, rationales, and data sources from the outset - building governance into automation at the point of construction rather than retrofitting it.
Three insurers - Manulife, Generali, and Intact Financial - have now crossed what the Index describes as the highest bar in the Leadership pillar: disclosure of enterprise-level AI return on investment. Manulife reported CA$300 million in AI enterprise value generated in fiscal 2025 and projects CA$1 billion by 2027. Generali disclosed approximately €100 million in bottom-line run-rate impact from AI and generative AI in fiscal 2025, raising its 2027 ambition to more than €350 million. Intact Financial reported CA$200 million in annual benefits from its AI models, with a projection exceeding CA$500 million by 2030.
That those three companies now stand apart from 27 others on this measure illustrates how far the sector remains from treating AI as a financially accountable enterprise capability rather than a technology initiative. The 2026 Index closes with the observation that the most consequential question for the year ahead is whether more carriers can close that gap - or whether the compounding advantage of the leaders becomes, in time, a structural separation.
The Evident AI Index for Insurance: Key Findings Report, June 2026, was published by Evident Insights. The Index covers 30 large insurers headquartered in North America and Europe and is based exclusively on publicly available data. The full report is available at evidentinsights.com.
