How Agentic AI will transform agent workflows

January 20, 2025 4:30 PM

Chris Raimondo, EY Americas consulting insurance leader. — Chris Raimondo, EY Americas consulting insurance leader

Independent insurance agents are ready for artificial intelligence, according to a Nationwide survey, and agents seem to be more trusting of AI tech than they were just a year ago.

Agent-assistant technology, Agentic AI, aims to provide assistance in underwriting, claims processing, customer service and risk management, as well as automatic regulatory compliance monitoring and reporting.

Digital Insurance interviewed Chris Raimondo, EY Americas consulting insurance leader, to learn more about Agentic AI as a solution and upcoming trend in the insurance industry this year.

When will we see more Agentic AI in the insurance industry?

Agentic AI has already launched in multiple industries, and it is expected that the insurance industry will begin piloting this technology in 2025. Early pilot use cases will focus on internal operations and workflows before there are customer or third-party facing implementations. With its transformative potential, Agentic AI is poised to become one of the key technology trends in the insurance industry in 2025.

How will Agentic AI impact agents' workflows and processes?

While still in its early stages, Agentic AI is expected to significantly transform agents' workflows by shifting their focus to higher-value tasks that require human interactions, relationship management and nuanced judgment, while automating more increasingly complex workflows and tasks that are data-driven and repeatable. For example, this will allow agents to spend more of their time on new business development and customer relationship management.

Agentic AI will collaborate with human agents and other AI systems, enabling a more efficient, outcome-driven approach to work. The transition from intelligent search and output provided by current AI systems such as GenAI, to full task orchestration, will make agents' work more streamlined and productive.

Can you share specific use cases for insurers?

The use cases that are starting to emerge for Agentic AI center around many of the core operations of an insurance carrier, such underwriting, claims processing and policy servicing. For example, in claims, Agentic AI will have the ability to manage end-to-end workflows for low- to medium-complexity claims, leveraging IoT data, images and video analysis to expedite decision-making while dynamically assessing this information in real-time for potential fraud.

As an example in underwriting, Agentic AI has the potential to facilitate dynamic risk assessment by analyzing significantly more robust data sets in real-time which can support more personalized policy pricing and offerings to customers.

How will this tech work with other AI systems?

Agentic AI is designed to work cooperatively with other AI systems, creating a powerful ecosystem of intelligent agents or multi-agent systems (MAS) that can collaborate to solve complex problems, execute multi-faceted workflows and support dynamic resource allocation, which can all be impactful to support key insurance operations such as claims processing.

How will it perform when used alongside GenAI?

Agentic AI and GenAI will work collaboratively, with the potential to unlock new levels of AI capability, autonomy and efficiency across the insurance industry. Agentic AI will leverage GenAI's content creation abilities to tackle complex, multi-step problems more effectively. GenAI will generate content and potential solutions while Agentic AI autonomously evaluates these outputs and can augment or execute goal-oriented tasks as it relates to these outputs. This combination can be incredibly valuable in a policy servicing workflow for a customer, where GenAI is creating personalized content related to the customer's policy, for example during a major life event, and Agentic AI is executing dynamic policy adjustments associated with the event with minimal manual intervention.

This powerful combination will lead to the development and implementation of more sophisticated and adaptive AI systems potentially revolutionizing how businesses operate and interact with technology and their customers. It will be critical for insurers to leverage both to stay competitive in an increasingly fast-paced market.