Providing insight from the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Swiss Re’s CEO P&C Re, Urs Baertschi, suggested many business leaders view AI as an evolutionary technology, rather than a revolutionary one, though he remains hopeful that it will have a positive impact on the re/insurance industry.
Baertschi explained there was a wide spectrum of opinions on AI at the WEF 2024, ranging from, “this is the most amazing technology that we’ve ever seen” to the aforementioned, “it’s a little bit more evolutionary rather than revolutionary”.
Going off his conversations, Baertschi observed that most of the business leaders lie in the latter camp, though there were still many discussions on the potential opportunities that may come out of AI.
Speaking on how the tech could influence the direction of the re/insurance industry, Baertschi said, “I clearly see some opportunities around closing the protection gap. This is about underwriting more risks in a better way, and in ways that we cannot get to today.
“There should be some efficiencies overall also on the risk management and risk mitigation side, so I’m still actually hopeful that there is a positive impact on our industry from AI.”
Another topic reportedly focused on at Davos was global resilience, which entails many social matters, namely geopolitics.
Baertschi commented, “Geopolitics might have been the number one topic here, the whole conference was trained on the element of rebuilding trust. When we were talking about these topics, we tried to actually frame it in the context of whether is it getting better or worse compared to 2023.
“I would probably say the vast majority are in the neutral camp, maybe more seeing things as getting worse. There are some optimists out there as well, and there are some reasons for hope, but clearly, this is going to be a topic that impacts resilience.”
Baertschi concluded, “This is where also our industry can play a very positive impact on society. Because what we fundamentally do is we take out some of the risks, and we help people when they need us the most.”
