Tech and AI playing pivotal role in Zurich NA’s midmarket push

(The Insurer) - Harnessing technology like artificial intelligence is proving to be a key enabler in Zurich North America’s effort to broaden its U.S. middle market footprint as it means underwriters can spend more time in the field with brokers and clients, its head of underwriting operations for U.S. middle market, Amy Nelsen, told The Insurer.

Zurich North America has long supported the U.S. middle market, but the carrier formed a distinct unit dedicated to the segment in 2020 as part of a concerned move to grow its presence in the sector.

As part of that growth push, Zurich North America has sought to recruit underwriters in areas of the U.S. that are outside the major metropolises.

“We’re expanding geographically, and penetrating new markets where we don’t have a presence,” said Nelsen.

“We’re hiring underwriters in different parts of the country versus your main city centers, and that is certainly helping to fuel our growth,” she explained.

In her role, Nelsen has responsibility for driving technology and operations.

“The complexity within the middle market space that lands on the underwriters’ desks lends itself to a lot of opportunities to help drive (technology),” she said.

Zurich North America wants its underwriters “out in the market”, Nelsen said, and “not sitting behind their desk eight hours a day."

“We want them making connections with brokers and understanding their customers, and so a lot of our focus right now is how do we give underwriters more time to be out in the market.

“Utilizing technology like AI, and some of the work we’re doing with Sixfold, is really helping us to do that,” Nelsen said.

That Sixfold partnership came about after the insurtech was one of nine winners in Zurich’s Innovation Championship 2024.

Through the tie-up, Sixfold worked with Zurich North America to improve its underwriting efficiency by leveraging purpose-built AI.

According to Sixfold, it can boost an underwriter’s capacity and accuracy while saving them time to spend with brokers and customers.

As Nelsen explained, in the middle market space, the partnership with Sixfold is helping Zurich North America’s underwriters with risk summarization.

“When an underwriter gets a piece of new business in the door, it's pages and pages and pages of exposure and loss information. What we're doing in the generative AI space is really trying to summarize that,” said Nelsen.

“We had done a little bit of a back-of-the-napkin calculation that our underwriters were reading novels, multiple novels, reams of paper, a week.

“If you can condense that into a better summary and really help them get to the meat of what they need to know, that's giving them their time back,” she said.

Nelsen said while it takes time to make sure the AI solution is working in the required manner, the benefits are worthwhile.

“You have to spend time running your test cases and whatnot through the model, and then you have to spend time in pilot mode with underwriters giving feedback and saying ‘this was right, this wasn’t right’.

“The model continues to get better and evolve. But the technology, if you look back a year or even six months ago, all of those different large language models are making exponential improvements in what they’re able to do.

“The underwriters that were involved from day one have even said that it’s gotten so much better,” Nelsen said.

Beyond supporting underwriters with assessing submissions, Nelsen said there are plenty of other opportunities to utilize the power of AI.

“We, like other carriers, are still fine tuning our policy administration systems and trying to make those better,” she said.

“Another thing that we're really focused on is doing (application programming interface) with our brokers. And my view is, if we can exchange data directly with our brokers and not through email, that, in and of itself, is going to drive a whole lot of effectiveness,” Nelsen added.