A recent report from ERGO, in collaboration with Google Cloud, explores how self-evolving AI agents could help insurers capture, preserve and scale undocumented institutional knowledge at risk of being lost, making it accessible across the organisation over the long term.
The ERGO Innovation Lab has published a report in cooperation with Google Cloud examining how companies, particularly insurers, can use adaptive AI agents to capture, preserve and scale undocumented experiential know-how, often referred to as “tribal knowledge”.
The report noted that a significant proportion of business-related knowledge remains neither formally documented nor systematically accessible. Instead, it is embedded in routines, situational decisions, or within the staff members themselves.
The report also warned that a large proportion of insurance professionals are expected to retire over the coming years, increasing the risk that decades of expertise could be lost.
According to the German Insurance Association (GDV, German only), one-quarter of Germany’s insurance industry employees belong to the baby boomer generation. As a result, a significant share of this highly skilled workforce is expected to retire over the next five years, taking decades of experience with them.
The report underlined that “self-evolving” or “self-improving” agents could help preserve and make this knowledge accessible over the long term.
These agents are adaptive AI systems that not only carry out tasks but can also review their own strategies, workflows and, in some cases, even their own architecture over time, adapting and improving them where necessary.
The report included a concrete implementation example of an “AI content engine”, as well as further suggestions for where such agents could be deployed across insurers’ value chain in the future.
Emilia Dang, Innovation Developer at the ERGO Innovation Lab, said, “The next stage in the development of agentic AI involves not only greater automation, but also how companies preserve, develop and harness knowledge. In view of demographic change and the worsening shortage of skilled workers, this is becoming increasingly important. Indeed, without a sustainable strategy, organisations run the risk of losing their decision-making criteria, contextual knowledge, and practical experience. The value of self-evolving agents lies where traditional automation ends: in experience, context and judgement. That is precisely where they can help to systematically capture individual expertise across generations, and transform it into scalable institutional knowledge.”
Michael Zimmermann, Principal Engineer at Google Cloud, added, “In highly regulated industries like insurance, the true power of agentic AI lies in human-guided autonomy. By pairing Google Cloud’s secure, scalable AI ecosystem with ERGO’s deep domain expertise, this whitepaper provides a forward-looking blueprint for preserving and scaling institutional knowledge responsibly.”
