Insurtech

Does size matter? Comparing 3 top insurance AI solutions

By Rayne Morgan

Insurance companies and professionals who choose to make the AI leap have many diverse tools, solutions and providers to choose from — whether big names, smaller yet established companies, or boutique operations with great potential. InsuranceNewsNet sat down with three of the top providers of insurance AI solutions to gain their perspective on what technology can offer and where their AI developments are headed.

“As we sit here today, the possibilities to transform both our business, our carriers’ business and our industry are super exciting, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it,” Jason Render, senior VP and head of Magnum in the Americas, Swiss Re, said.

“We think it’s totally appropriate for insurers to expect real results, and at scale with AI. And so, our focus is really transforming the industry in specific areas of complexity,” Grady Behrens, global head of product marketing, Shift Technology, said.

“A persistent challenge for insurers today is maintaining enterprise-grade data quality and consistency across underwriting, rating and reinsurance. ZestyAI is designed to establish a single, trusted property data foundation that is applied consistently across underwriting, pricing, renewals, filings and reinsurance decisions,” Kumar Dhuvur, co-founder and chief product officer, ZestyAI, said.

Swiss Re

Swiss Re is a major player in insurance and reinsurance, with a name that’s known globally. Its Magnum platform offers a suite of AI tools to support automated underwriting and other related tasks, such as admin work.

Render describes Swiss Re’s suite of tools as “AI-enabled, future-ready technologies” that “help our clients deliver fast, accurate point-of-sale decisions.”

“Our API technology allows us to plug into a carrier’s current ecosystem. Typically, the underwriting value chain would be a front-end that collects part one information, and then Magnum is connected to drive the part two or the medical questionnaire, make decisions along the way and then eventually pass that information down to the underwriting workbench and or an admin system,” he explained.

It comes pre-loaded with Swiss Re’s “Life Guide” underwriting manual, which contains 30,000 rules for North America — meaning Magnum can handle “a wide variety of underwriting scenarios,” from medical conditions to lifestyle factors, occupational and advocation risks, and more.

Additionally, the Magnum Analytics platform allows insurers to “gain valuable insights” around data-driven decision-making, assess relevant KPIs and monitor and understand agent behavior.

Render said he believes Magnum Suite is “moving in a good direction,” with plans to enhance features while keeping humans closely in the loop.

“There’s clearly a transition underway where carriers are moving away from augmenting their expert deterministic systems with Gen-AI and agent-based models. We’re also doing the same thing at Swiss Re. We’re trying to reimagine because I think that’s what agentic AI is forcing us to do, right? Re-engineer, reimagine what an underwriting, client-facing underwriting journey could look like with AI in the center,” Render said.

Shift Technology

France-based Shift Technology does not operate on the same scale as Swiss Re, but has made a strong name for itself since being founded in 2014. Its anti-fraud claims product is particularly popular in the United States, and it boasts six out of 10 major U.S. P&C insurers as clients.

“We create products that solve specific areas of complexity for insurers, and really towards improving their accuracy, improving their efficiency. So, for example, we have multiple products that do things like determine policy coverage or assess policy coverage, estimate liability, detect subrogation opportunities. In all of those, we really are producing an AI-based product that solves for that specific area of complexity,” Behrens explained.

For Shift Technology, pinning down the right AI product for their clients is “about the right AI, right data and right expertise.” As such, most of their products are a blend of different types of AI, such as predictive and machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI or autonomous AI.

Like Swiss Re, Shift also “fundamentally believes in AI and human collaboration,” but plans for a future where different AI solutions can interact with each other to “share data that’s built for AI insights.”

“We think that the future is going to be this more AI-centric view, where a number of AI tools or products are working together,” he said.

Zesty AI

When it comes to smaller-scale, boutique options, Zesty AI is highly specialized and has become increasingly popular.

Its risk and decision intelligence platform “unifies property-level data, predictive AI models and agentic AI automation to fundamentally transform how insurers see, price and manage risk.”

Dhuvur explained that Zesty’s system of intelligence includes specific AI models for the major disasters impacting the property insurance industry. It assesses actual loss data from carriers and uses predictive modeling to support automated decision-making in underwriting, regulatory, and pricing workflows.

While Zesty primarily focuses on property insurance for the time being, Dhuvur said its next step is to expand to other markets

“Across all of this, our approach remains consistent — insurers make the decisions, and ZestyAI supports their execution,” Dhuvur said.

Swiss Re is a major global insurance and reinsurance company founded in 1863.

Shift Technology is a French “AI-first” company that exclusively provides AI products to global insurers. It was founded in 2014 and has offices around the world, including the United States.

Zesty AI is a technology company providing solutions for the P&C insurance industry. It was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco, CA.

Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter, and editor with over 10 years' combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at rayne.morgan@innfeedback.com.