Zurich Insurance has deployed Cytora’s AI-powered risk digitisation platform across five countries in just 90 days, cutting manual underwriting triage time by 80% as part of a wider global rollout.
The insurer now plans to expand the platform into more than 20 markets over the next 16 months as it scales AI-driven underwriting operations across its commercial insurance business.
Cytora’s platform acts as an intelligence layer within Zurich’s underwriting workflow, converting unstructured and multilingual submissions into structured, decision-ready risks aligned with the insurer’s global underwriting standards.
Before the rollout, Zurich’s underwriters manually reviewed and interpreted incoming submissions across multiple systems, limiting the number of risks they could process efficiently and making prioritisation difficult.
Zurich launched the programme with the goal of reducing quote times by around 60 minutes through greater automation and faster risk processing. The insurer needed a system capable of handling large volumes of unstructured submissions across multiple countries while adapting to local market requirements.
According to Zurich, the deployment has already delivered significant operational gains. Manual triage time has dropped from 75 minutes to 15 minutes, while digitisation accuracy has increased from between 70% and 80% to 98%.
Straight-through processing for intake workflows has also increased from 10% to 95%, allowing a much larger proportion of submissions to move through underwriting workflows automatically.
Cytora’s platform supports multilingual processing out of the box, enabling Zurich’s regional business units to operate in local languages without requiring separate custom builds for each market.
Zurich selected Cytora because of its configurability, commercial insurance expertise and ability to scale globally through a headless architecture that integrates with existing systems.
Zurich Insurance head of customer and digital IT for commercial insurance Armin Schaefer said, “Cytora united cutting-edge tech and a winning team to deliver fast, collaborative, high-quality results at unprecedented speed.”
Cytora CEO Richard Hartley said, “Through this partnership we have created a model for the rapid and effective deployment of agentic AI powered automation across Zurich’s global operations.
“Huge efficiency savings have been achieved without compromise. Zurich can launch new markets and products with minimal setup while adapting to local requirements – delivering consistent, accurate, decision-ready output every time. This partnership showcases the power of agentic AI to deliver tangible and immediate results on a global scale.”
The rollout marks one of the largest recent deployments of agentic AI technology within commercial insurance underwriting operations.
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