Significant September nor’easter: Upcoming storm surge, beach erosion and power outages  September 23rd 2026

AI operational benefits arriving before financial gains for re/insurers: S&P

A new S&P survey found that most re/insurers have moved past the conceptual stage of AI adoption and into operational integration, though only around one-third say their AI strategy is fully integrated, with the rest still working toward enterprise-wide rollout.

“AI is increasingly transforming the insurance industry across multiple dimensions, with widespread deployment growing rapidly, driven by optimism that the technology can improve business performance,” S&P explained.

The rating agency’s survey of 121 entities globally, representing around 38% of the total assets of the re/insurers it rates, shows a shift from localised experimentation toward formal strategic integration, including at some of the largest multiline insurers and reinsurers.

S&P observed that AI is increasingly used to improve customer experience, underwriting and risk management, and claims processing, with benefits appearing earlier and more visibly than financial gains

Bevaya Benchmark: Insurance-Trained AI Beats Frontier Models on Loss Runs, Insurance's Hardest Documents

Across 346 real loss runs, every leading general-purpose AI model scored between 78% and 85% field accuracy, from the most expensive configurations available to the least. Bevaya's insurance-trained InsurGPT™ loss run model scored 93.1%. The difference is the training, not a newer or larger model.

NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Bevaya, the AI Agent platform built for insurance, today announced benchmark results comparing insurance-trained and general-purpose AI on the industry's hardest documents, loss runs. Bevaya's InsurGPT™ loss run model proved both more accurate and faster than the strongest general-purpose model tested, the combination insurers need to move submissions and claims through without a person opening every file.

AI Apocalypse? Don't Get Distracted

While we've suddenly landed in the middle of a debate about whether AI may be about to obliterate the human race, I hark back to a profile I did for the Wall Street Journal about a brilliant AI and robotics researcher from Carnegie Mellon named Hans Moravec.

The focus was his provocative idea that humans would be able to download their brains — their entire consciousness, their full personality, an exact replica of them — into computers, which could then teleport to any spot in the universe or spawn an infinite number of what Moravec called "mind children."

The memorable headline was:

Good News: You Can Live Forever; Bad News: No Sex

I asked Moravec how long it would take for his vision to be realized. "Oh, a long time," he said. "Maybe 25 years."

That was 35 years ago.

So I'm not going to worry much for years about all the talk of impending doom. Timelines on sci-fi-like change tend to be way, way off. But, under the radar, there are plenty of AI issues that should be major concerns right now, including for insurers.

Let's have a look.

I'll start with Bill Gates's recent manifesto, which, among other potential dangers from AI, called out the prospect that AI will supercharge the work of malign actors, perhaps leading to bioterrorism, massive cyberattacks, and more. While we can discuss the potential long-term threats to humanity from AI, these are the kinds of threats I think we need to focus on today. These threats are already being pursued, whether by individuals looking to extort massive amounts of money or by nations looking for weapons in an increasingly belligerent world, and AI clearly provides exponentially more computing capability.

Paul Carroll, Editor-in-Chief, Insurance Thought Leadership