IBM and Quant AI launch Ava to automate insurance contact centres

IBM and Quant AI used IBM Think 2026 in Boston to push Ava as something more serious than another insurance chatbot: a production contact-centre system built to handle policyholder service end to end. The agent works in both English and Spanish, combines voice and digital chat, and is designed to authenticate customers, process payments, send forms and escalate complex issues to human agents without losing the conversation history.

That production angle matters. Quant AI says Ava is already live with Fortitude Re, which gives the launch a working insurance deployment rather than a lab demo. In the Fortitude Re environment, Ava is aimed at the daily grind of policy servicing, claims questions, payment work and documentation, the kind of tasks that usually clog call centres and force customers to repeat themselves as they move between channels.

The early numbers are the real test. Quant AI says Ava is resolving 84% of calls, average handling time has dropped from 11 minutes 30 seconds to 8 minutes 30 seconds, and first-call resolution has risen from 71% to 86%. Those are not cosmetic gains. In insurance service operations, shaving three minutes off a call and raising first-contact success can ease backlog pressure, reduce transfer volume and free human agents for exceptions that actually need judgment.

IBM’s broader pitch at Think 2026 fits the same direction. The company framed the event, held May 4-7, 2026, as a showcase for the “agentic era,” where enterprise AI is expected to do more than answer questions and instead coordinate workflows across systems. IBM says watsonx Orchestrate can be used to build customer-service agents without code across digital channels, and it says many insurance AI projects still sit in silos even as early wins start to appear.

The insurance stakes are getting clearer in IBM’s own research. IBM says 40% of insurers’ AI spend goes to operational effectiveness and cost reduction, and 77% of agentic AI use cases over the next year are expected to land in claims. That makes Ava look less like a novelty and more like part of an execution layer for servicing and claims.

The Fortitude Re tie-up also has history behind it. In 2023, IBM and Fortitude Re announced a transformation agreement reported at $450 million to modernize insurance customer service operations with AI, automation, hybrid cloud and mainframe-as-a-service technology. Against that backdrop, Ava reads as the next phase of a multi-year push: not just conversational AI, but a governed, cross-channel tool built to take actual work out of the contact centre.