The insurance industry has spent two years building its artificial intelligence foundations. The question that now defines the competition is simpler, and harder: is any of it actually working?
That is the central challenge framed by the Evident AI Index for Insurance, a June 2026 benchmarking report from intelligence firm Evident Insights that tracks AI maturity across 30 of the largest insurers in North America and Europe. The second annual edition of the Index arrives with a verdict that will reward some carriers and unsettle others. The gap between the leaders and the rest of the sector, it finds, is not closing - it is beginning to calcify.
Allianz has overtaken AXA to claim the top spot in the rankings, driven by broad-based improvement across all four of the Index's measurement pillars: Talent, Innovation, Leadership, and Transparency. AXA holds second place, with Manulife, Zurich and Liberty Mutual rounding out the top five. Among US-headquartered carriers, Travelers ranks seventh overall and leads in documented AI outcomes among domestic property and casualty writers.
The results land at a moment of unusual urgency for the industry. Agentic AI is coming, and with it, the prospect that the technology will move from assisting underwriters and claims handlers to replacing entire decision sequences. Few carriers have yet successfully scaled AI, according to separate research from Capgemini - but the Evident data suggests the window for catching up is narrowing.
The central argument of the 2026 Index is straightforward: early movers are not simply ahead, they are pulling further ahead. Allianz and AXA established their AI foundations before generative AI became a mainstream conversation - some Index insurers referenced the technology in public disclosures as early as 2014 - and those foundations are now producing compounding returns.
Allianz's lead is clearest in talent and innovation. The company holds the largest AI specialist workforce in the industry, approximately 28% larger than AXA's, and has invested in enterprise-wide training at a scale few peers can match. Its AI Run program, a 12-week generative AI and prompting curriculum, reached more than 150,000 employees across 70 countries. Its DataXcellence initiative has supported more than 35,000 employees in data literacy and analytics. The company has extended AI education to its Supervisory Board, a signal of how seriously it treats governance.
In innovation, Allianz now leads the sector in research and patents, having climbed from fourth place in 2025. It has registered more than 900 AI use cases worldwide spanning underwriting, claims, fraud detection, and customer service. Its Nemo platform, launched last November, represents the most advanced example of agentic AI deployment found among the 30 insurers: a coordinated system of seven specialized agents that handles food spoilage claims from customer photo submission through to settlement, with specialized modules verifying storm data, checking policy coverage, assessing fraud risk, executing payment, and logging decisions for regulatory compliance.
The broader picture, however, is more cautious. Across 65 publicly disclosed AI use cases with reported outcomes, productivity gains remain the dominant story - they appear in 75% of deployments. Revenue uplift appears in just 2%.
That distribution reflects where AI is easiest to deploy and measure. Claims management accounts for 28% of disclosed use cases, followed by internal process operations at 20% and underwriting and pricing at 17%. These are workflows where a baseline is established, AI is introduced, and the change - reduced manual review, improved routing, shorter turnaround times - can be quantified relatively quickly.
The larger financial leverage, the Index argues, lies elsewhere. Claims typically account for 60% to 80% of premium income in the industry. Even modest improvements in risk selection, pricing accuracy, fraud detection, and claims adjudication carry financial impact that dwarfs the gains available from efficiency alone. The most advanced insurers are beginning to pursue that prize. Only 8% of disclosed use cases currently show AI improving decision quality across connected workflows - but that share is growing, and it is growing fastest among the top-10 carriers.
This finding echoes what insurers have acknowledged across recent surveys: the tools exist, but the confidence to deploy them in core underwriting decisions does not yet match the investment.
The most dramatic individual movement in the 2026 rankings belongs to Zurich, which climbed eight places from 12th to fourth - the largest year-on-year gain of any insurer in the Index.
Zurich's advance was driven primarily by talent. It grew its AI workforce across all capability categories, with AI Development roles now comprising 44% of its AI talent base. It has invested in a £1.3 million AI apprenticeship program in the UK covering ethics, governance, accountability, and practical applications, and has launched initiatives including an Agentic AI Hyper Challenge and AI prototyping internships.
Underlying that talent growth is a platform strategy. Zurich's ZurichIQ is a modular generative AI platform now live across multiple markets and embedded across claims, underwriting, legal, and employee productivity functions. The suite includes AgentIQ for agents and brokers, GuidelineIQ for underwriting adherence, ClaimsIQ for coverage and fraud detection, and VoiceIQ for service center performance.
For carriers and brokers operating in the US market, the Index offers a competitive intelligence read that differs from the usual survey-based assessments. It relies exclusively on publicly available data - job postings, research publications, patent filings, earnings calls, press releases - and scores companies against 68 individual indicators. That methodology limits the risk of self-reporting bias that distorts many technology adoption surveys.
AI is accelerating in insurance, and the regulatory environment is tightening in parallel. As of early 2026, 23 states and Washington, D.C. have adopted the NAIC's model bulletin on AI use in insurance. New York's Department of Financial Services enacted Circular Letter No. 7 requiring insurers to establish governance frameworks and explain how AI factors into underwriting and pricing decisions. Carriers that have invested in Responsible AI infrastructure - the Transparency pillar in the Evident framework - are better positioned to navigate that scrutiny.
Among the three US carriers that have disclosed enterprise-level AI return on investment, the numbers are material. Manulife, a Canadian composite insurer with significant US operations, reported CA$300 million in realized AI enterprise value in fiscal 2025 and projects CA$1 billion by 2027. Intact Financial reported CA$200 million in annual benefits from its AI models and projects that figure will exceed CA$500 million by 2030. Generali disclosed €100 million in bottom-line run-rate impact from AI and generative AI in fiscal 2025, with a revised target of more than €350 million by 2027.
Those figures are still rare. Only three of the 30 insurers in the Index have disclosed comparable enterprise-level ROI estimates. The rest of the sector, the Index finds, is still measuring AI by process metrics rather than financial outcomes - a gap that, as the leaders demonstrate, is worth closing.
The Evident AI Index for Insurance: Key Findings Report, June 2026, was published by Evident Insights and is based on publicly available data. The full report is available at evidentinsights.com.
