How AI is changing life insurance

InsuranceNewsNet.com, September 1, 2026

Artificial intelligence is expected to reshape the life insurance industry over the next decade by improving efficiency, reducing costs, enhancing underwriting, changing the nature of many jobs and eliminating some of them outright.

Most industry observers expect AI to augment but not replace most insurance professionals. Roles centered on judgment, relationship management, regulatory expertise and complex decision-making are likely to remain in high demand, while routine administrative work will continue to be automated. The life insurance workforce is therefore expected to shift toward higher-skilled, technology-enabled positions rather than experience widespread job elimination.

T. Necole Gibbs, an Atlanta-based insurance broker and digital marketing consultant, stated: “I truly believe I wouldn’t have survived the insurance industry if I had not implemented AI into my daily business workflow.” She added that being open-minded enabled her to make the technological pivot that “was necessary and changed the trajectory of my sales, revenue and commission checks.”

Roughly 40% of life underwriters report that AI’s main advantage is accelerating decisions, according to Pacific Life’s 2026 Underwriting Outlook Survey, while 35% point to better utilization of medical and third-party data. AI adoption is projected to drive an 11% increase in new annualized individual life insurance premiums in the U.S. by 2030, Deloitte reports, shifting the anticipated market from $19.1 billion to $21.2 billion.

On a day-to-day basis, Gibbs explained that AI functions as a personal virtual assistant, giving her more time to prospect versus having to concentrate so much on follow-up and service. “Incorporating AI strategies into my sales proposals not only increased the quality of my relationships, but it also elevated a once struggling insurance business to a multimillion-dollar book of business,” she said.

An early adopter

Patra Corp. provides a variety of technology and back-office services to insurers. The company, under the leadership of CEO Pratap Sarker, jumped in early on AI. Patra provides an AI platform that assists with policy data extraction, comparing quotes and verifying policy limits against checklists.

“AI is embedded in what we do every day. We’ve moved past simply using it as a productivity tool and are using it to redesign business processes altogether, internally and on behalf of our clients.”

Pratap Sarker
Chief Executive Officer, Patra

Patra received a U.S. patent this summer for the AI and human-in-the-loop methods at the core of its Policy Checking AI. The patent describes a method for automatically extracting values from insurance documents and guiding a reviewer directly to the information that matters. Among other things, the system scans a document, maps the position of every word, locates the items a user is looking for, identifies the likely value associated with each, and then directs the user to confirm the result.

Sarker noted that traditional insurance operations have always required significant manual effort for repeated tasks such as moving information between systems, reviewing documents, validating data, and completing transactions in a variety of legacy systems. AI automates large portions of that work, which is getting done faster than ever before.

“But what excites me most isn’t doing the same work faster. It’s tackling larger, more transformational opportunities that would have been impractical before. Instead of individual tasks or isolated process fixes, we’re now able to help organizations rethink entire workflows and operating models, with AI orchestrating everything behind the scenes.”

Pratap Sarker
Chief Executive Officer, Patra

Strategic redeployment

Sarker emphasized that the winners in the AI revolution will be those organizations that “treat AI as a strategic capability, not a technology experiment.” He added: “AI offers organizations the opportunity to redeploy people and costs away from undifferentiated back-office work, toward customer-facing work that drives growth and advantage.”

As AI gains traction across the life insurance industry, employment data points to a sustained decline in industry jobs. The insurance industry’s workforce continued to shrink through the spring, with employers cutting 10,700 jobs in May after eliminating 9,100 positions in April and 5,700 in March, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The trend continued in June, when employment edged lower and the industry’s unemployment rate rose to 2.7%, reaching its highest level since May 2025.

Insurance analysts say there is no reason for concern at this point.

“While it’s difficult to draw broad conclusions from a single month’s employment data, in our view, the industry remains well capitalized, and current workforce actions appear to be driven primarily by organizational restructuring and productivity gains rather than financial stress.”

Sridhar Manyem
Senior Director of Industry Research & Analytics, AM Best

AM Best surveyed insurers on AI adoption earlier this year. While 37% of respondents indicated they expect to redeploy employees to higher-value work by using AI to automate routine, low-judgment tasks, only 9% anticipated a net reduction in head count.

Michel Léonard, chief economist and data scientist for the Insurance Information Institute, noted that insurance employment follows a cyclical trend, as it is an industry that does not “over-hire or over-fire through economic cycles.” AI is likely to be a net positive for agents and employment in the industry, Léonard added.

“Technology will keep agents competitive in a crowded market. It’s not just AI but a range of automation tools that speed up everything from policy acquisition and creation through claims processing. AI has proven most useful in sales and marketing – directly impacting agents’ bottom line.”

Michel Léonard
Chief Economist & Data Scientist, Insurance Information Institute

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