Future trends: Personalization, automation, and agentic artificial intelligence in insurance

The insurance industry has long been viewed as devising limited product-market strategies, making incremental refinements to existing products, processes, and systems. While the insurance industry has relied heavily on continuous improvement trends in many areas, recent innovations in information technology and risk modeling have brought disruption and new opportunities that many insurance executives never anticipated. As insurance has become a less expensive and less essential component of the risk management process for businesses, many companies are considering new revenue and profitability opportunities in advising and consulting. At the same time, others are exiting the insurance industry altogether, highlighting the question of how necessary the infrastructure and knowledge transfer of the insurance industry is for the management of increasingly global risks (Ghosh & Gupta, 2020; Kelly, 2019; Chien & Chiu, 2021). While these shifts brim with opportunities and challenges, they also bring great ambiguity. New questions arise: Who will regulate the insurance industry? Who will train the personnel capable of helping businesses deal with the big issues of risk—such as the consequences of increasingly severe weather, terrorism, labor disputes, and globalized supply chains? What role will e-business, business-to-business exchanges, and niche marketing play? Will insurance companies position their customers and share financial information with them through the use of predictive analytics? What will risk communication look like in an evolved insurance industry? How will the industry deal with issues of social responsibility in providing coverage for disasters? What will be the future for captives in reducing risk management costs? What role will the Big Five play? What are the future needs in the areas of insurance education and consulting? What technological advances will be on the cutting edge? What will be the future of international insurance? What will be the requirements for successful insurance operations in the future?