Sapiens index: 67% of insurers expect full AI autonomy by 2029

A 475-firm global study finds agentic AI adoption lagging far behind ambition, with only 16% of insurers using it.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Tue, 13 October 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A modern control room contains a curved glass-top desk with a keyboard, facing a large, three-panel curved display showing bright blue data visualizations, illuminated by bright, diffused ambient light.

Sapiens International, the London-headquartered insurance software group, has published the inaugural Insurance AI Maturity Index, an international benchmark covering 475 senior professionals across the UK, Nordics, Benelux, North America and South Africa. The headline finding is stark: two thirds of respondents believe AI in insurance will operate fully autonomously within two to three years, yet only a quarter of the industry currently qualifies as an "Autonomous Leader" under the index's own scoring criteria.

The gap between expectation and execution is the story. Sapiens segments insurers into four maturity bands: Reactive, Enabled, Operational, and Autonomous. A roughly even quarter sits in each tier, suggesting the industry is genuinely dispersed rather than polarised. Scoring is based on cloud adoption, master data strategy, AI governance policy, and workforce planning, the infrastructure preconditions for autonomous decisioning, not the AI itself.

Agentic AI: high aspiration, thin deployment

The sharpest divergence in the data concerns agentic AI, the class of systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks independently rather than merely responding to prompts. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents say it is a priority; only 16% have adopted it. Even among those using AI in some form, the industry still defaults to conventional automation (40%) and standard AI (42%) over agentic systems (24%).

Where AI has taken hold, operational gains are measurable. Seventy-seven per cent of insurers report that AI has trimmed an average of three months from product deployment cycles. Improvements in turnaround times (60%), customer experience (58%) and manual handling costs (53%) are the most cited benefits. Agentic AI trails on each metric, largely because the governance infrastructure to trust it is not yet in place: 53% of agentic AI outputs are still reviewed by a human, and 15% of AI decisions are overridden entirely.

Geography matters. Benelux (33% Autonomous Leaders) and the Nordics (28%) outpace North America (25%), the UK (23%) and South Africa (18%). The Nordics stand out on workforce strategy: 49% of Nordic insurers mandate AI use for all employees, versus 25% in the UK and 17% in North America. That structural difference in talent policy may explain why the Nordics also report the highest confidence in agentic AI outputs, even as they override more than 20% of AI decisions more frequently than their peers.

The convergence read-across: fintech infrastructure meets insurance operations

For cross-sector strategists, the Sapiens index is a proxy for a wider dynamic playing out across financial services. The preconditions for autonomous AI, clean data architecture, cloud-native infrastructure, AI governance frameworks, are the same whether the end application is underwriting, credit decisioning, or algorithmic trading. Insurance has historically lagged banking in technology investment cycles, but the 67% autonomy-within-three-years figure suggests the sector is now compressing a decade of modernisation into a single capital cycle.

That compression has capital implications. Insurers in the Reactive tier face a binary choice: accelerate spend on cloud migration and data strategy, or cede market position to Autonomous Leaders who are already deploying agentic workflows across policy, claims and compliance. The talent dimension sharpens this: Autonomous Leaders are hiring AI-ready staff at 57%, against a 38% international average and just 20% among Reactive firms. Workforce capability is becoming a lagging indicator of AI maturity rather than a leading one.

The deeper macro question is regulatory. As agentic AI takes on consequential decisions, claims settlement, underwriting risk scoring, reinsurance modelling, oversight frameworks across the FCA, EIOPA and US state regulators will need to catch up with deployment realities. The index notes that governance policy is one of the four scoring criteria, yet Reactive firms are still in "early stages" on this dimension. That regulatory lag is a systemic risk that extends well beyond insurance, touching any sector where autonomous AI is beginning to carry fiduciary weight.

Paul Wheeler, CEO of Sapiens, said the findings point to "an industry-wide imperative" and warned that insurers who do not accelerate their timelines "risk being left behind."

The index is designed as an annual tracker, meaning the 2027 edition will be the first real test of whether the 67% autonomy prediction is a credible forecast or a measure of collective optimism.