A new era for insurance: Rethinking the industry in an AI-enabled world

The insurance industry has reached an inflection point. Technology is no longer just modernizing operations; it is reshaping how insurers create value, build trust and compete.

CGI's 2026 Voice of Our Clients (VOC) research reveals an industry that remains optimistic about growth while recognizing that incremental change is no longer enough. Insurance leaders are moving beyond digitizing individual processes toward redesigning business models that are more intelligent, resilient and centered on customer outcomes.

This shift is not driven by technology alone. Economic uncertainty, climate risk, geopolitical change, evolving customer expectations and rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are converging to reshape the industry.  Together, these forces are changing how insurers operate today, and how they will compete tomorrow.

Today’s reality: Transforming for growth, resilience and customer value

Insurance executives are balancing ambitious transformation goals with an increasingly complex operating environment. While growth remains a priority, organizations must also respond to rising customer expectations, evolving regulations and accelerating technological change.

Technology and digital acceleration are the leading macro trend affecting insurers, cited by 73% of executives, followed by changing social demographics (59%) and political, fiscal and regulatory change (58%).

AI is accelerating this transformation. Rather than simply improving productivity or automating individual tasks, insurers are increasingly applying AI to redesign business and operating models, strengthen decision-making and improve customer experience. The conversation is shifting from isolated AI use cases toward to AI-enabled, and ultimately AI-native, enterprises.

Customer expectations continue to raise the bar. Consumers increasingly expect the same seamless digital experiences, personalized interactions and responsive service they receive in banking and online retail. For insurers, this is accelerating the move from product-centric organizations toward businesses designed around customer needs. Modern AI capabilities, combined with digital platforms and trusted data, are making that long-standing ambition more achievable.

What is slowing execution?

While digital transformation, AI and customer experience remain strategic priorities, execution continues to challenge many insurers.

Legacy technology, fragmented data, competing transformation priorities, limited operating model agility and talent constraints continue to slow progress.

Talent shortages illustrate a broader challenge. Nearly half (49%) of insurance executives report that talent shortages have a high business impact, while 28% experience significant difficulty recruiting IT talent. Increasingly, the issue is not simply finding people; it is creating enough organizational capacity to deliver multiple transformation initiatives successfully.

Many insurers are addressing this challenge by expanding their use of managed services. Within three years, 55% expect substantial or fully managed infrastructure, while 48% anticipate the same for application services.

Trust as a competitive advantage

One of the clearest insights from our VOC research is that trust is increasingly being earned through technology as much as through brand reputation.

Customers expect secure digital experiences, intuitive self-service, and responsive interactions. They also expect organizations to protect their data, safeguard privacy and demonstrate operational resilience. As a result, cybersecurity, resilience, data governance and technology sovereignty remain among insurers' highest IT priorities.

Cloud strategies reflect this evolution.

Rather than pursuing cloud adoption as an objective, insurers are adopting hybrid, risk-controlled architectures that balance innovation with resilience, security and regulatory compliance. Cloud adoption continues to accelerate, with 72% of insurers using cloud services for both organizational and customer data. At the same time, organizations are placing greater emphasis on maintaining control over their most critical information assets.

The findings suggest insurers are no longer responding to disruption alone. They are building technology foundations that strengthen trust while supporting long-term growth.

AI moves from experimentation to execution

AI has rapidly moved beyond experimentation and into mainstream business strategy, with 64% of insurers intending to leverage AI within core business processes, compared with 17% focused primarily on administrative functions and 15% on IT-only applications. AI is increasingly viewed as a business transformation capability that supports growth, operational performance and customer outcomes.

Execution, however, remains the challenge.

Although 71% of executives report that digitalization is significantly impacting their operating model, only 19% believe their organizations are highly agile enough to support digital transformation.

The same pattern appears in AI adoption. While AI has entered the strategic mainstream, only 47% of insurers have established an enterprise-wide AI strategy, and just 21% have extended that strategy across their broader ecosystem of partners and suppliers.

The research also shows accelerating adoption of both traditional and generative AI, while multimodal and agentic AI are beginning to enter early adoption. Together, these developments point to the next stage of AI maturity, where organizations move beyond isolated automation toward intelligent capabilities embedded throughout the enterprise

Insurers of the future: Turning technology into business value

Insurance is gradually evolving from a reactive financial product into an intelligent, embedded service that helps customers anticipate, prevent and manage risk.

AI, connected ecosystems, trusted data and cloud-native architectures will enable insurers to deliver more personalized protection, improve decision-making and respond more quickly as customer needs evolve.

The insurers that succeed over the next decade will not necessarily be those that adopt the most AI or migrate to the cloud the fastest. They will be the organizations that successfully align technology, data, governance and operating model transformation with clear business objectives and measurable customer outcomes.

CGI’s 2026 VOC research highlights an industry at an important turning point. The question is no longer whether insurers should modernize. It is how effectively they can translate technology investments into stronger customer relationships, greater resilience and sustainable growth.

Those that succeed will rethink not only the technology they deploy, but also how insurance is designed, delivered and experienced.

At CGI, we help insurers digitally reengineer across the enterprise—modernizing core systems, strengthening resilience, and scaling trusted AI to deliver measurable outcomes. Learn more about our insurance work. Also, reach out to me for additional insights from the 2026 CGI Voice of Our Clients insurance research, and watch our latest CGI industry foresights video for insurance.