Deloitte launches new paper on scaling agentic AI in life insurance

Hong Kong, 6 May 2026 – Deloitte released a new paper, A moment to lead: The foundations Asia Pacific life insurers need to scale agentic AI with confidence, setting out a practical blueprint for life insurers to move from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment of agentic artificial intelligence (AI).

Life insurers across Asia Pacific are entering an inflection point. Growth expectations are rising, customer demands are being reshaped by digital-native experiences, and regulators are calling for greater transparency and precision. At the same time, enterprises are embracing AI to drive cost efficiency, revenue growth, and increasingly rewrite business models. Many insurers are still operating on foundations built for a different era, creating a widening gap between market expectations and operational reality.

Customers want speed, certainty, and seamless service – often benchmarking their insurer not against industry peers, but against the immediacy of retail, fintech, and e-commerce platforms. Traditional life insurance operating models were never designed to meet those expectations at scale. Closing that gap will require more than incremental automation; it will require a rethinking of how work gets done.

Drawing on Deloitte’s experience supporting insurers through its Insurance Growth Suite, the paper focuses on how agentic AI can be scaled responsibly – moving beyond experimentation to real operational impact.

"The promise of agentic AI is transformational: driving growth and product innovation, elevating customer experience, modernising insurance processes and risk management, and redefining talent and workforce roles. Yet this potential will only be realised if insurers have the right foundations in place – spanning operating model, data, governance, and architecture," says Arthur Calipo, Deloitte Asia Pacific Insurance Leader.

A step-change in insurance economics

For life insurers, the significance of agentic AI lies not in faster task execution, but in its ability to reshape how work is designed and coordinated across the entire enterprise. By orchestrating decisions, data, and actions end-to-end, agentic systems unlock improvements in cost efficiency, productivity, speed, and consistency that incremental automation has historically struggled to deliver.

Early adopters are already demonstrating tangible gains across claims, underwriting, and policy servicing – shifting economics, strengthening customer trust at critical moments, and creating operating leverage that compounds over time. As competitive pressure intensifies and customer expectations continue to rise, the strategic question is no longer whether agentic AI can create value, but whether insurers have the foundations required to realise that value at scale.

Illustrative benefits where agentic AI is implemented with clear accountability and strong governance include: 20–30% faster product refresh cycles, 10–20% uplift in conversion rates, 30–50% reductions in underwriting and claims decision cycle times, 20–35% reductions in servicing costs, and 15–30% improvements in forecast accuracy in finance and risk.

“A competitor that successfully scales agentic AI ahead of others will establish a sustained performance advantage across cost, speed and decision quality”, notes Rudi Winklhofer, Deloitte Asia Pacific Insurance Growth Suite Leader.

While life insurers have been quick to adopt generative AI and launch pilots, only a small fraction have scaled them enterprise-wide, but those who have are seeing material improvements in cost structures and customer experience. Across Asia Pacific financial services firms, just 21% report at least moderate use of agentic AI today, but this is expected to jump to 78% in two years, with 26% expecting extensive or fully integrated use of agentic AI across their operations¹.

Six foundations for scaling agentic AI

The paper cautions that agentic AI amplifies whatever it is given: unclear processes, weak decision-making and fragmented data will still produce flawed outcomes – just at greater speed. To move from pilots to sustainable, enterprise-grade deployment, Deloitte identifies six foundational capabilities that life insurers should prioritise:

• An outcome-based operating model
• Zero-Ops mindset and value-focused thinking 
• Modern, composable architecture
• Governance for trustworthy AI
• Data quality and responsible AI
• Talent, culture and human judgement

Human empathy remains central to the insurance experience. In claims and other emotionally significant moments, judgement, reassurance, and clarity cannot be delegated. The most effective insurers combine intelligent orchestration with human-centred service, using automation to free people for the interactions that matter most.

Seven no-regrets moves for life-insurance leaders

Across its work with insurers in the region, Deloitte’s paper sets out seven pragmatic “no-regrets” actions that leaders can begin taking today to capture near-term value while building long-term capability.

To access the full report , please visit https://www.deloitte.com/ap/en/perspectives/agentic-ai-scale-for-life-insurers-in-apac.html

¹ The State of AI in the Enterprise - 2026 AI report | Deloitte Global