Underwriting is at a turning point. It is shifting from a slow back-office function to a strategic lever that will decide which insurers grow profitably and which get left behind. By 2030, most personal and SME underwriting will be fully automated, while complex commercial risks will be handled by underwriters augmented by AI copilots and decision-support tools.

The stakes are high:

• Up to 40% productivity gains from fully integrated, end-to-end workflows
• Up to 50% cost reduction on document-heavy tasks like loss runs, SOVs, and applications
• 65%+ processing cost savings already achieved in real deployments, with accuracy above 99%

For the insurance ecosystem, this shift is about how carriers, MGAs, and brokers redesign workflows, connect systems, and redeploy their people so that automation handles the routine while humans focus on risk, relationships, and strategy.