APAC life insurers face agentic AI test as legacy and data gaps persist

McKinsey and Deloitte say business leaders must own AI adoption as 42% of carriers remain constrained by legacy infrastructure.

Asia-Pacific life insurers are entering an agentic artificial intelligence inflection point, but legacy systems and weak data foundations could determine whether adoption improves performance or adds operational risk.

The pressure is rising as 42% of insurers remain constrained by legacy systems, even as customer expectations, growth targets and productivity demands push carriers to modernise.

Abhilash Sridharan, Partner at McKinsey & Company, said artificial intelligence is becoming urgent because insurers need to understand risk more accurately and support customers during moments of uncertainty. Analytical artificial intelligence identifies patterns in structured data, whilst generative artificial intelligence can process unstructured information such as medical reports.

Agentic artificial intelligence adds another layer by orchestrating and executing complex workflows across distribution, underwriting, claims and servicing. Sridharan said some insurers are showing progress in automated underwriting, claims handling or distribution productivity, but no carrier has mastered the shift across all areas.

Arthur Calipo, Asia Pacific Insurance Leader and Partner for Financial Services at Deloitte, said artificial intelligence can improve growth, efficiency and resilience. Faster adopters could gain an advantage in how they acquire, develop and retain customers.

The gap lies in execution. Sridharan said leading insurers are not deploying isolated use cases but transforming full business domains such as underwriting or claims around measurable outcomes. They are also building reusable capabilities, modern data foundations and operating models that connect business, technology and artificial intelligence teams.

Calipo said readiness depends on leadership, business ownership, data quality, technology architecture and governance. Business leaders, not only technology teams, need to drive adoption.

Modernisation cannot mean replacing everything at once. Sridharan said insurers should first redesign high-value customer journeys, then build digital, data and artificial intelligence layers over existing infrastructure.

For life insurers, the test is whether agentic artificial intelligence can improve underwriting, claims and distribution without disrupting core operations.