AXA has begun a large-scale deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot to employees across the globe, extending its AI-at-scale strategy three years after it first launched Secure GPT, its internal generative AI service.
The rollout is a global one, but it lands amid a wave of similar moves among UK insurers, making the comparison to firms such as Legal & General and Aviva a natural frame for UK readers tracking how the sector is adopting AI.
The rollout will embed AI assistance directly into everyday Microsoft Office tools, including Teams, Outlook and Word, with AXA saying the aim is to help staff execute daily tasks more easily and collaborate more effectively across teams and geographies as the tool is progressively introduced across the organisation.
Secure GPT was developed to give all AXA employees and business applications secure access to large language models, built on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service. AXA has previously said the platform was rolled out to its roughly 140,000 employees globally, though the current headcount using the tool has not been independently confirmed and may have shifted since that figure was first reported.
Matthieu Caillat, group chief technology and AI officer and chief executive of AXA Group Operations, said the deployment marked a new milestone in the insurer's ambition to stay at the forefront of innovation in the sector.
"Artificial Intelligence represents a significant opportunity to empower our employees, strengthen our innovation leadership, and better serve our customers," Caillat said. He added that AXA's ambition was to combine technological excellence with a responsible, human-centric approach, so that AI creates lasting value for its people, customers and wider society.
AXA said it will also accelerate a wider AI upskilling programme alongside the rollout, designed to build employees' practical and ethical AI competencies while encouraging them to retain human oversight over key decisions.
Karima Silvent, deputy general secretary in charge of human resources, compliance, audit, AXA EssentiALL and GIE AXA, said the new solutions built on the momentum of Secure GPT's deployment and marked a further step toward an AI-enabled workplace, extending beyond simply giving staff access to leading AI capabilities.
"Thanks to the constructive dialogue with employee representatives around the use of AI and the feedback of our employees, we are strengthening our collective ability to innovate and better serve our customers," Silvent said.
AXA's rollout places it alongside a growing list of insurers making similar moves. Legal & General signed a three-year agreement with Microsoft in June 2026 extending Microsoft 365 Copilot to its entire 10,000-strong global workforce, deepening its use of Azure as part of a broader technology modernisation drive. L&G has pointed to an earlier Copilot pilot in its retail business as evidence of tangible gains, though headline figures from vendor-linked announcements typically warrant some caution given the difficulty of attributing outcomes cleanly to a single tool.
Commentary on the deal from industry analysis site Resultsense, published in June 2026, noted a widening gap between insurers deploying AI at scale across their operations and those still confined to smaller pilots, a distinction likely to become more pronounced as tools such as Copilot move from productivity add-ons into core workflows.
Other UK insurers have taken a more targeted approach to generative AI. Aviva has rolled out an AI-powered underwriting summarisation tool, first for individual life insurance applications and more recently extended to critical illness cover, converting lengthy medical reports into concise summaries for underwriters and cutting review times in life underwriting by around half, according to the insurer.
A July 2026 industry ranking by Evident, covered by Insurance Journal, named Aviva alongside AXA and Allstate as early movers in AI-mediated distribution, pointing to insurers' experiments with conversational AI and LLM-based quoting channels as preparation for a future shaped by AI-driven discovery and purchase journeys.
Against that backdrop, and with the FCA's first Regulatory Priorities report for insurance, published in February 2026, committing to assess how firms are actually using AI and where the barriers to adoption lie, AXA's emphasis on human oversight and upskilling reflects a wider recognition across the sector that scale alone will not satisfy regulators.
How firms evidence accountability for AI-assisted decisions is likely to shape the next phase of adoption as much as the productivity gains themselves.
