AI use surges in commercial underwriting, but strategy lags behind
Commercial underwriters are putting AI into production fast, but only 20.4% of leaders say they have a clear strategy to run it well.
AI is moving from pilot to production in commercial P&C underwriting, but the operating model is still catching up. In Convr’s 2026 Insurance Talent and Tech Trends Survey, 53.6% of 211 commercial insurance professionals said they already had AI deployed in at least one production underwriting workflow, and 70.6% said they delivered new AI underwriting tools to their teams in 2025. Another 65.9% planned to deliver more in 2026, while 89.5% expected more underwriting tasks to be automated in the coming years.
That momentum does not translate into confidence. Only 20.4% of leaders said they were highly confident their organization had a clear and actionable AI strategy for underwriting, and more than 40% placed themselves in the bottom half of the confidence scale. Convr said 56.9% described their AI culture as cautiously open, a useful shorthand for an industry that wants the upside but still wants proof before it rewires day-to-day work.
The friction shows up where underwriting still breaks down: manual data entry, dated legacy technology and too many submission data sources. Convr said 63% of carriers operate in hybrid technology environments, with a legacy core layered with cloud tools. That is exactly why point solutions often stall out after the demo stage. A tool can automate a task, but if submissions are still being chased across email, attachments and disconnected systems, underwriters end up with another screen instead of a cleaner workflow.
John Stammen, Convr’s chief executive, used the survey to frame the industry’s next problem as operational, not experimental. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in commercial underwriting, but how to deploy it responsibly and consistently. Convr’s 2026 product direction fits that view, with agentic AI workflows aimed at referral decisions, financial analyst work and underwriting authority decisions, all of which push beyond simple task automation and into workflow control.
The 2026 results also sharpen the year-over-year comparison. Convr’s 2025 survey of 200 U.S. commercial P&C insurance decision-makers found 92% were up-training underwriting teams in data analytics, automation and digital underwriting, 84% said entering underwriting data was tedious, and 74% said their company had delivered new underwriting tools in 2024. In other words, the conversation has moved from skills and digitization to whether carriers can actually turn those investments into a coherent operating model.
That gap matters because the wider market is already rewarding better execution. WTW found on March 19 that North American P&C insurers using more sophisticated analytics posted combined ratios six percentage points lower and premium growth three percentage points higher than slower adopters, yet only 16% were using AI to augment human underwriting. Boston Consulting Group said only 38% of P&C insurers are generating value at scale from AI in core workflows. The carriers that win next will not be the ones with the most tools on paper, but the ones that redesign underwriting around data, governance and disciplined change management.
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