Insurance leaders say AI a top imperative but struggle to deploy it

NEW YORK - April 2, 2025 - Roots, creator of the agentic AI platform for insurance and InsurGPT™, the world's first generative AI model for insurance, today announced findings from its inaugural State of AI Adoption in Insurance 2025. The company surveyed more than 240 insurance executives to determine their AI adoption challenges and opportunities. Its report highlights those as well as emerging trends and provides recommendations for insurers to drive business growth and AI success.

Roots found that 82% of insurance executives are keenly focused on accelerating AI transformation to improve financial and operational performance, recognizing the significant positive impact it can generate. Results also indicate that insurers must upgrade and upskill technology and talent to meet their goals.

Key findings from the State of AI Adoption in Insurance 2025 survey include:

Insurance leaders are enthusiastic about the possibilities for AI.

• Nearly 90% express a positive opinion about employing AI, and 67% identify as "strongly in favor."

A gap between AI exploration and practical deployments exists.

• Over 90% of insurers are actively exploring, testing or using AI capabilities.
• Only 22% of insurers have successfully deployed AI solutions in production.

Roadblocks to AI adoption exist and likely impact production deployments. 

• Top concerns to AI adoption include skills and resource constraints (52%) data challenges (40%) and regulatory challenges (36%).

AI priorities vary across business functions.

• Claims teams prioritize improving claims processing efficiency (72%), reducing claims cycle times (64%), and enhancing client satisfaction (45%) as their top three priorities for this year.
• Underwriting teams aim to focus on increasing premium growth (75%), increasing speed to quote (53%) and lowering loss ratios (43%) in 2025.
• IT Operations teams are working to integrate AI (or scale) throughout the business (65%), reduce operational costs (48%) and modernize the tech stack (45%).

Accuracy is the cornerstone of AI success. 

• Insurers identified four essential success elements for AI initiatives: AI accuracy (71%), AI trained for insurance (45%), speed to ROI (43%), and speed to production (42%).

Underwriting and claims teams’ use cases focus on operational improvements. 

• Top AI use cases focus on solving insurers' data problems and automating repetitive jobs, such as data/document processing (64%) and process automation (60%).

“Insurance executives recognize AI's transformative potential, and our survey shows they are prioritizing AI to enhance operational efficiency, lower costs and boost customer satisfaction,” said Chaz Perera, CEO and co-founder of Roots. “Underwriting, claims management and IT leaders are committed to making AI a pillar of their future success, despite challenges in adoption and deployment. The complexity of implementing AI underscores the need for strategic partnerships, external expertise and insurance-specific solutions to help guide insurers on accelerating the path to ROI.”

Roots also unveiled its new name, logo, and website this month. Formerly Roots Automation, its change is to highlight the company’s advanced AI focus.