In 2026, insurers will move from experimenting with AI to scaling it with human oversight, stronger governance, and decisions driven by real-time data for underwriting, Travis MacMillian, president of the Americas at Xceedance, has suggested.
Xceedance said 2026 will represent a decisive shift toward operationalised AI, real-time risk intelligence, and participatory insurance models that fundamentally reshape how coverage is written, managed, and experienced.
“The most successful carriers will combine human judgment with machine intelligence to underwrite smarter, leverage AI to make underwriters more efficient, spending time on core risk decisioning, and create new kinds of partnerships with policyholders,” MacMillian added.
With this in mind, the firm has identified several key technology trends expected to shape the insurance industry in 2026.
These include smarter, real-time underwriting powered by streaming risk data from IoT, telematics and environmental sources, enabling more granular, behaviour-based pricing; the rise of AI agents, with employees increasingly training and supervising AI systems, providing ethical oversight and strengthening portfolio underwriting; AI governance and explainability becoming core compliance requirements to address bias, hallucinations and regulatory transparency; ecosystem convergence, as insurance becomes embedded in sectors such as mobility, health and energy; and the emergence of the “DIY policyholder”, as consumers use smartphones and connected devices to collect and share their own risk data, prioritising speed, transparency and control over traditional inspections.
MacMillian continued, “As the industry transitions more rapidly than ever before, these trends all point toward one theme—insurance that’s more connected and collaborative.”
“Technology is transforming risk, the policyholder experience, and driving new possibilities in underwriting risk selection.
“It’s changing the nature of insurance—from something that’s assessed at a point in time to something that is interpreted and understood continuously.”
