Will AI be insurance's smart phone moment?

When I joined Swiss Re in 2001 for my first job in insurance, digital media players were all the rage. Remember? Their 5-gigabyte storage capacity was all very impressive for the time, until you consider that the latest smart phones have something like 2 terabytes of data capacity – hundreds of times more than those early devices.

Technological advancements like these have not merely changed the way we listen to music or talk to each other; they have fundamentally transformed entire industries over the past 25 years. Not so with insurance. Many of our processes are still more or less the same as they were in 2001.

But insurance's smart phone moment may be coming, courtesy of artificial intelligence. As AI technology moves rapidly from experimentation to execution, it is beginning to change how assets are built, how risks are managed, and even how value is created. We're just getting started.

For corporates navigating an increasingly volatile environment – and for brokers supporting them – the implications are significant. From hyperscale data centres and power infrastructure to new liability exposures and cyber dependencies, AI is expanding not only what needs to be insured, but how risks accumulate.

Simultaneously, it offers insurers new tools to respond and manage these new risks. At Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, our priority is not AI just for its own sake. We're deploying this technology with an eye toward strengthening our risk expertise to better support our clients and brokers with faster, more reliable risk insights – in a world where AI is a source of insurance opportunities, insurance challenges and insurance solutions.

What do I mean by that? AI-driven investment is already creating large new pools of insurable assets. A recent Swiss Re Institute study highlights that capital spending for the leading big tech companies in 2026 is forecast to increase by 36% to more than USD 600 billion compared to last year – roughly 75% of which is directly linked to large data centres. The global data centre sector is forecast to grow by 14% through 2030 at a compound annual rate – mostly in the US where construction spending on data centres has already significantly outpaced growth in total non-residential construction.

These very real assets emerging from the AI boom are highly relevant for corporates operating in engineering, construction, energy, technology and infrastructure-heavy sectors. Demand for data centre insurance is growing accordingly, with global premiums tied to the sector expected to reach USD 24.2 billion by 2030.

At the same time, AI is introducing new risk dynamics that matter to insurance professionals. Concentration risk around cloud and AI service providers, emerging liability exposures linked to algorithmic decision-making, and increasingly complex cyber and business interruption scenarios are stretching traditional risk frameworks.

In this environment, our corporate clients want more than capacity. They need confidence that risks are understood holistically while priced appropriately. Brokers, in turn, need underwriting partners who can respond quickly, explain decisions clearly and help structure solutions in a fast-moving market.

At Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, we are applying AI across the underwriting value chain to support exactly that. In complex lines such as engineering and construction, AI-enabled workflows can consolidate large volumes of submission data, uncover key risk drivers and highlight inconsistencies early.

Similarly, on the claims side, our experts have developed an AI-powered platform to automate and enhance the management of complex commercial insurance claims. Our handlers get help analysing vast amounts of unstructured data to improve speed, accuracy, and efficiency as they look to identify third-party recovery opportunities or even instances of fraud. To complement this, we recently launched an innovative tool that transforms historical claims data into actionable insights, strengthening our decision-making across the value chain.

AI’s real value in managing commercial risk is not merely automation, but in augmentation. While early adoption across the industry has often focused on efficiency, the greater opportunity is enabling underwriters and claims handlers to deliver better decisions and outcomes, for clients and brokers as well as for our own business activities.

Importantly, the decision-making part of these processes remains with our experts. Think of it this way: AI powers advanced analysis and insights, but business critical judgement and client dialogue is still powered by humans.

For corporates and brokers alike, trust hinges on data quality and transparency. It's no small challenge – across our industry, fragmented data remains a major constraint.

That's why Swiss Re has been investing for years in unifying our systems, improving data quality and embedding validation into our workflows. AI helps us turn unstructured data into actionable insights, flag anomalies early and increase the consistency of our decision-making.

The result is not just efficiency, but clearer rationale behind outcomes, which is critical for constructive broker and client conversations.

When I see how data and technology is transforming other industries, I get a bit impatient for my own industry. I'd like to see the same kind of impact. After all, smart phones didn't simply improve upon digital media players; they became something much more revolutionary – an all-purpose device for almost every aspect of our lives.

Similarly, I believe AI has the potential to accelerate our industry's transformation beyond single solutions. With the right data foundation, it can serve as a catalyst to reimagine entire processes end-to-end, and it may soon become as essential in the insurance value chain as smart phones are now in our daily lives.