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AI in Insurance: Key Takeaways from Excelerate 2025

Insurers are moving from prediction to Intelligent Decisioning - unifying predictive, generative, and agentic AI for governed, explainable, customer-centric outcomes.
Written by
Adrian Mincher
Published on
September 18, 2025
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By 2031, it is forecast that AI will likely dominate the operational backbone of insurance companies in South Africa (according to research from Mobility Foresights). This rapid expansion reflects a sector-wide drive for automation in underwriting, pricing accuracy, claims efficiency, and fraud prevention. In a competitive, digital-first environment, AI is becoming indispensable, transforming the way insurers deliver personalised offerings while managing risk with greater precision.  

At Earnix’s Excelerate 2025 Summit, these themes took centre stage. The conference showcased how insurers worldwide are moving beyond prediction to embrace Intelligent Decisioning, unifying predictive, generative, and agentic AI capabilities to deliver agility, transparency, and governance at scale. The result is not just faster decisions, but smarter, explainable, and customer-centric outcomes that can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

Predictive AI has long helped insurers anticipate risk, refine pricing, and improve underwriting accuracy. Generative AI now takes this further, surfacing contextual recommendations and supporting frontline staff in real time. Imagine a broker in Johannesburg guided by AI to ask the right questions at exactly the right moment, or a digital channel dynamically tailoring policy offers to a Soweto-based customer. Predictive AI showed insurers what might happen; generative AI helps shape what should happen next.

The Rise of Intelligent Decisioning - The next leap is Intelligent Decisioning, orchestrating end-to-end insurance workflows, from product design to customer engagement, with built-in governance.  Unlike “black box” AI in other industries, insurers require decisions that are auditable, explainable, and aligned with standards. Earnix’s platform ensures innovation does not come at the expense of accountability.

Equally important, no-code/low-code environments democratise innovation. Business users, not just IT teams, can launch new products, adjust pricing, or respond to market shifts with agility. In a market where speed-to-market defines competitiveness, this capability is a game-changer.

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"Predictive AI showed insurers what might happen; generative AI helps shape what should happen next."

Adrian Mincher
Earnix

The New Paradigm - This year’s Excelerate Summit saw leaders from across the insurance ecosystem gather to explore the journey from predictive models to intelligent decisioning – the a new paradigm that blends predictive, generative, and agentic AI capabilities into governed, transparent, and customer-centric workflows.  

To be a true industry leader, insurers need to move beyond experimentation and position AI as central to how they price products, manage portfolios, and engage customers. This theme is especially pertinent to South Africa, where many carriers are under pressure to cut operational costs while still innovating in a fiercely competitive market. But efficiency alone is no longer enough; insurers must achieve both operational agility and meaningful differentiation in customer experience if they are to stand out.

By drawing on richer data sources – from IoT signals to geospatial climate data – underwriters can shift from static analysis to real-time, insight-driven action. This not only speeds decision-making but also ensures resilience against emerging risks such as climate volatility and cyber threats.

Explainabilty, Governance and Trust - The summit also placed strong emphasis on explainability, governance, and trust. Unlike consumer apps that can experiment with opaque recommendation engines, insurers operate in a heavily regulated environment where every decision must be auditable, transparent, and fair. Trust in AI-driven insurance decisions will depend on technical accuracy as well as on clarity, fairness, and adherence to evolving regulatory standards.

Taken together, the themes of Excelerate 2025 paint a compelling picture of where the industry is headed. South African insurers face the same challenge as their global peers: fragmented systems, siloed data, and growing reliance on third-party datasets. Unified, governed data layers are emerging to solve this, ensuring that decisions are powered by clean, integrated, and compliant information. Trust in data builds trust in AI, a vital foundation in an industry where transparency underpins customer loyalty.

More importantly, AI in insurance is about more than corporate performance. Intelligent decisioning enables insurers to tackle systemic risks, from climate change-driven weather events to rising cyber threats, with speed, scale, and precision.  

Just as Excelerate 2025 demonstrated, the industry is moving into an era where AI is not simply predictive, but intelligent, governed, and transformational.

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