AM Best to present insurer AI adoption survey results June 11

AM Best will put hard numbers behind insurer AI chatter when it presents survey results to Society of Insurance Research members on June 11. The webinar, Adoption and Deployment of AI: AM Best Survey Results, will be led by Sridhar Manyem, senior director of industry research and analytics, and it is aimed squarely at the question executives keep asking: where is AI actually in production, and where is it still a slide-deck promise?

The findings come from AM Best’s survey of rated insurers, packaged in a special report titled Artificial Intelligence Appears to be Ready, But Most Insurers Are Not. That framing fits the current state of the market: insurers may broadly agree that AI matters, but many still lack the data, controls and systems needed to scale it without breaking the workflows already in place. For carriers and vendors alike, the value of the presentation is less about hype than about adoption maturity, governance and the practical barriers that separate experimentation from deployment.

AM Best’s earlier special report in late April put some concrete numbers on that divide. Among more than 150 respondents, including rated insurers and MGAs with a Best’s Performance Assessment, 41% said their organizations were actively using AI across core business areas. Nearly 20% said they were at an advanced stage of implementation, and nearly 60% expected AI to significantly transform their business models within one to three years.

The same survey also showed where the friction lives. Data readiness, security and privacy, and integration with legacy systems were the biggest obstacles to implementation. AM Best said respondents were less worried about change resistance and third-party model risk, which suggests the industry’s AI debate has shifted away from abstract skepticism and toward the harder work of plumbing, governance and cyber exposure. AM Best also said a majority of respondents already had a formal AI policy in place, a sign that insurers are building guardrails at the same time they are trying to deploy the technology.

The Society of Insurance Research has framed the session around a broader policy concern as well, saying growing investment in AI is increasing the need for regulatory oversight to protect both the insurance industry and consumers. That makes the June 11 presentation more than a survey readout. It is another benchmark for an industry that is being judged less on enthusiasm for AI than on whether it can prove the technology is helping underwriting, pricing, claims and service without exposing carriers to new operational risk.