Last week, Datos Insights brought together more than 100 insurance carrier executives and 35 vendor sponsors at the InterContinental Boston for the 2026 Insurance Leaders Technology Forum (ILTF). Held April 22 to 23, ILTF draws some of the industry’s most senior technology leaders alongside industry experts and technology providers shaping the future of insurance.
The 2026 ILTF centered on an urgent theme: Defining the Intelligent Insurer. Attendees will remember this time as marking the transition from anticipating or piloting AI to implementing operating model changes to fundamentally transform insurance for the era of agentic AI.
The Market Is Strong … but the Easy Part May Be Over
The backdrop for this year’s ILTF was a largely healthy market. In P&C, the combined ratio improved to approximately 95% in 2025—the strongest underwriting performance in roughly a decade. However, premium growth is decelerating and projected to reach around 4% in 2026.
In life, annuities, and group benefits, U.S. annuity sales reached US$461 to US$464 billion in 2025—a fourth consecutive record year. Group benefits premium growth has held steady at 5% to 7%, though expense ratios of 86% to 89% signal persistent margin pressure.
Beneath these headline figures, however, conditions show looming challenges. Risk is more concentrated, exposure growth is amplifying the impact of individual events, and growth is slowing in key segments. Bloomberg Intelligence keynote speaker Matthew Palazola observed that investors are increasingly rewarding execution discipline and return consistency over growth alone. The bottom line for the industry: Performance in the next cycle will depend not on market tailwinds but rather on how well carriers execute.
The AI Imperative … and a Logical Disconnect That Needs to Be Reckoned With
With everyone’s mind focused on execution, AI dominated the agenda at this year’s forum, and the research we at Datos Insights brought to the room revealed a striking contradiction at the heart of how the industry is approaching it.
Survey data from 36 senior carrier technology leaders showed that the AI pilot phase is largely over. The share of carriers with AI in production grew from 37% to 61% in a single year. But when you look at where AI is being deployed, a more cautious picture emerges. The most common production use cases are concentrated in document processing: reading, extracting, and summarizing. Four of the top five production use cases fall into this bucket. Deployment in the functions where competitive differentiation actually happens, underwriting (56%) and claims (50%), was more limited in scope and scale.
The data on competitive posture makes the contradiction explicit. Seventy percent of carriers have spent under US$500,000 on AI projects in the past year. Only 8% of carriers believe they are currently ahead of their peers in AI. Yet 70% expect AI to deliver at least a moderate competitive advantage within three years. Expecting advantage while implementing conservatively is a logical disconnect the industry will have to reckon with. AI is rapidly becoming a baseline capability. The carriers embedding it into core decision workflows, rather than limiting it to internal efficiency, are beginning to pull ahead. The window to make that choice deliberately is narrowing.
The Way Forward: The Intelligent Insurer
Datos introduced a framework at this year’s ILTF for what it actually looks like to use AI for competitive advantage: the Intelligent Insurer Operating Model. At its core, the model argues that the traditional insurance operating model—linear workflows, siloed processes, systems built for record-keeping—must give way to coordinated workflows that combine human judgment with AI-driven execution, where competitive position is defined by how intelligently an organization makes decisions and how quickly it can act on them.
Two of the most active debates at ILTF illustrate where this thinking is being applied in practice. First, underwriting is emerging as the primary opportunity for AI-driven differentiation, a shift from the industry’s earlier focus on claims efficiency. Second, the “build vs. buy” question is being reopened. AI has compressed development timelines enough that the conversation is shifting from buying technology to avoid the burden of building, to buying platforms to build upon or even to begin building those platforms.
We’ll be publishing further blog posts and research exploring the Intelligent Insurer Operating Model in full detail, as well as additional takeaways from ILTF. But the central message from the forum was clear: The next phase of competition will not be won through strategy alone. It will be won by carriers that operationalize AI, align their data and workflows, and move from idea to execution faster than their peers.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Boston—the carriers who shared candid perspectives in the roundtables, the sponsors who made the event possible, and the speakers who brought real-world experience to every session. We’ll see you next year.
Missed it or looking for more? Join us for our agentic-AI-focused events in Chicago in May (P&C) or Des Moines in June (L/A/B), or be part of our Insurance Technology Forum at InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas at the end of September. And if you’re interested in the London market, InsTech is hosting events there in July and September! To register or for more information, visit: https://datos-insights.com/events/conferences/#insurance.
