Philip Natoli (pictured), chief actuary at ERGO NEXT Insurance in Palo Alto, California, says AI adoption inside actuarial teams has moved faster than he expected, and it is reshaping how the profession trains its next generation of talent. Natoli holds bottom line accountability for pricing and profitability at ERGO NEXT, the small business insurer that Munich Re's ERGO Group fully acquired in 2025 and rebranded from NEXT Insurance earlier this year.
Natoli has spent his career on both sides of the actuarial ledger, working in consulting and at carriers before joining ERGO NEXT. He said many of his colleagues now open an AI assistant before anything else. “Many of the people on my team are now using Claude, GPT, and Gemini as their primary user interface to their daily business,” he said. “Think about how much of a change that is from a person who might start their day logging into a Windows or Apple desktop. Now the first thing they open is Claude or Gemini.”
That shift, he said, sits alongside a larger one: AI's growing ability to reproduce the technical work that once defined entry-level actuarial careers.
Natoli recalled his own early career at EY, where building and rebuilding Excel-based reserve models was a full-time job. He said he recently prompted an AI agent to build a reserve study using a given data set, and it produced the work almost instantly. “The AI can do that in seconds,” he said. “The speed at which it can produce high quality analyses, that's a real thing, and it was really a shock to me.”
That speed does not remove the actuary's responsibility for the result. “What's happened now is you can more quickly produce volumes of high quality, rigorous analyses, but the actuary still has to stand in front of all of them and be accountable for every one,” Natoli said. “That creates a lot of pressure on the actuarial function to continue to uphold those standards in the face of a significantly larger volume of workflows and outputs that AI capabilities can produce.”
“The AI is an enabler for actuaries from an operational and production perspective. But I think it creates a new bottleneck for the kind of professional rigor and trust that actuaries have to maintain.” — Philip Natoli, chief actuary, ERGO NEXT Insurance
The efficiency gains raise a harder question: how does the profession train its next generation if AI is absorbing the foundational work junior staff once relied on to learn the trade. It is a question that echoes the insurance industry's growing talent crisis, as carriers across the US confront a wave of retirements alongside a shrinking junior pipeline.
Natoli said he would be nervous if he were a college graduate entering the field today, given how much of the traditional on the job training pathway has narrowed. “If I were a college graduate right now, I would probably be nervous,” he said. “The previous paths to on the job corporate training, businesses may in practice need less and less of those individuals.” He added that the pressure compounds an existing shortage. “The insurance industry is already in something of a talent crisis,” he said. “A huge number of the boomer generation are phasing out of the industry, and even pre-AI, that was creating risk. Now there's a potential crunch on the other end, a lower number of entry-level candidates.”
Natoli's approach to driving change internally leans on identifying early adopters rather than mandating adoption evenly across his team, a strategy that echoes how AI adoption is accelerating across other underwriting lines as insurers test similar models beyond the actuarial function. “You're not going to find even adoption across everyone on the team,” he said. “You have to identify the early adopters and the potential leaders within your team, and really enable and empower them, so they become the prototype of what you want.”
He said leadership has to model the behavior it wants to see. “We're a profession that focuses on risk,” he said. “By our nature, we lean toward risk aversion and a cautious, conservative mindset. I've personally tried to over-index on breaking down some of those natural instincts.”
That tension is unlikely to ease, which is part of why some insurers are exploring efforts to use AI to ease the industry's talent crisis rather than widen it. For now, Natoli said, responsibility for standards stays with the people in the room. “It's really up to leaders within the actuarial space to stay the course with the rigor and professionalism that comes with the actuarial credential, while also investing in innovation,” he said. “It's a balance at the end of the day.”
