Insurance companies recorded the fastest gains in AI readiness compared with other industries globally, reflecting significant progress in transforming processes and modernising data foundations, according to Accenture’s AI Progress Barometer.
Accenture, a global professional services company, has released findings from its inaugural AI Progress Barometer, which tracks how AI readiness among approximately 3,000 of the world’s largest companies evolves over time, benchmarking each company against peers across industries and regions.
Companies are scored on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the highest level of AI readiness among those assessed.
The Barometer revealed that 10 of the 18 sectors tracked showed overall improvement in AI readiness, with insurance companies (+8 to 48.6) recording the fastest gains globally, followed by travel (+5.7 to 46.7) and consumer goods (+5.2 to 43.7).
Gavin Stephenson, Accenture’s Data & AI lead for EMEA, said, “This progress reflects a shift from experimentation to execution at scale. A growing number of European companies are beginning to reinvent business processes with AI, while cleaning their data and skilling their people. For instance, insurers are not just deploying AI on top of existing processes but are redesigning how work gets done—straightforward claims can be automated from damage assessment to payment, while complex cases get flagged for a human expert. This redesign is only possible with clean, integrated and accessible data underneath, and with a workforce that is properly trained.”
The data also showed that European companies improved their AI readiness scores by 1.6 points over the past six months, compared with a 1.1-point increase in North America.
However, North American companies continue to maintain a higher overall level of AI readiness on average, with scores of 48.9 out of 100 compared with 43.1 for European companies.
Mauro Macchi, CEO for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Accenture, said, “Europe is clearly building real momentum in AI, mainly driven by its largest companies. They understand that for AI to deliver more value, faster, it requires enterprise-wide reinvention, not just plug-and-play adoption. This means rethinking operating models, redesigning how work gets done, strengthening their data and technology foundations, and most importantly ensuring leadership engagement and proper governance and change management. The speed of execution will define Europe’s future competitiveness.”
The pace of progress varies significantly across countries and sectors. Companies in France (+5 to 43.1), the United Kingdom (+4.8 to 44.5), and Spain (+4.6 to 39.9) recorded the largest improvements in AI readiness.
