Agentic AI is moving from demos to measurable value—helping P&C insurers improve underwriting efficiency by 36%, reduce claims processing times by 40%, and lift customer satisfaction by 15% or more.
Across industries, AI agents could unlock as much as $450 billion in value by 2028 through meaningful cost reduction and revenue growth. But success won’t be equally distributed. In P&C, only a small number of carriers have achieved mature deployments. For many, weak governance and outdated infrastructure remain the biggest barriers to scale. The winners will be those pairing a modern operational infrastructure and strict data controls to orchestrate processes from quote to claim—and everywhere in between.
Agentic AI: Why This Moment Matters
Today, leading carriers are deploying agentic AI “agents” that can autonomously plan and execute tasks across workflows, adjusting as new information becomes available. Among other things, this can free underwriters, adjusters, and others from repetitive tasks and proactively deliver critical insights to accelerate decision-making. This is all achieved with as little or much human oversight as desired. But the path to scale does come with caveats:
- Only around 2% of organizations have successfully scaled agentic AI
- Gartner estimates 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by 2027 due to unclear ROI
- Rampant “agent washing”—rebranding chatbots as agents, for example—only adds confusion
Where Agentic AI Delivers Value
Underwriting
As I pointed out in a recent post, up to 60% of broker submissions in commercial lines are never even reviewed due to process bottlenecks. That’s billions in unrealized premiums. In a 2025 survey, underwriters cited poor visibility into, and an inability to prioritize, submissions in the pipeline. Embedded AI agents can fix this via their ability to:
- Ingest and normalize submissions from any channel
- Cross-check carrier appetite, exposure limits, and profitability targets
- Score and prioritize opportunities autonomously
- Alert underwriters to emerging imbalances
With AI-powered solutions like Guidewire UnderwritingCenter, for example, intake and pre-clearance checks can be automated, reducing what might otherwise take an hour down to as little as 10 minutes. Likewise, Guidewire’s acquisition of ProNavigator brings “intelligent insurance” a major step forward by leveraging AI to instantly surface the information underwriters need to make smart, informed coverage decisions.
Claims
Results are equally compelling in claims. Boston Consulting Group (BCG), for instance, has found that agentic AI can cut claims-handling times up to 40% and reduce operating costs by 30-50%. Guidewire’s Claim Summarization, for instance, reduces the time and effort spent on manual claim reviews by generating a concise summary and high-level facts of loss on a claim from both structured data and unstructured notes. Claim Summarization is the first piece of Guidewire Claims Assistant, an agentic AI-driven solution within Guidewire ClaimCenter that enhances the role of adjusters to focus on activities requiring human judgment and empathy.
Meanwhile, ProNavigator analyzes claim context to deliver smart suggestions and returns tailored guidance to claims handlers directly within Guidewire ClaimCenter. This AI-based solution is already helping major carriers cut average call handling times, accelerate knowledge updates, and gain new visibility into knowledge gaps to drive continuous improvement.
Architecture Makes All the Difference
While it’s still early days, three key elements consistently separate scalable agentic AI initiatives from pilots that stall:
A Modern Core as Orchestrator: A cloud-native platform like Guidewire offers the architectural backbone needed to anchor AI actions to the real-time decision and orchestration logic within the system of record—ensuring AI agents operate accurately, safely, and at scale.
Tight Governance and Observability: Top performers treat agentic AI as a governed production system, using human oversight, testing, and traceability to make every AI decision accurate, auditable, and explainable.
Fast Wins Fund a Larger Vision: BCG advises narrowing focus to a few high-value use cases with measurable P&L impact—and I agree. So far, the fastest paybacks have been found in submission intake and FNOL. Short-term wins create executive confidence and fuel broader transformation.
Seizing the Agentic Advantage
The economics of agentic AI are compelling—and gaining traction. To learn how carriers around the world are leveraging the promise of agentic AI, watch the video below:
