Insurance trends

Insurance companies around the world confront similar challenges – AI disruption, climate-driven losses, market instability and regulatory volatility. It’s harder than ever to keep pace and maintain resilience while doing the routine business of keeping customers happy, detecting fraud, ensuring compliance, managing risks and delivering profitability.

Industry leaders have insights into what they consider the most disruptive forces shaping insurance in 2026 – and what’s coming next. Could we be nearing a third major financial crisis? Where can agentic AI create value, and where is governance most critical? What practical steps can you take to protect growth, innovate responsibly and deliver on your promises?



Global Insurance Trends

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See what our experts predicted for 2026

A Fortune 500 insurer will begin phasing out policy admin systems in favor of insurance copilots in 2026.

Franklin Manchester
Principal Global Insurance Advisor

Many straightforward insurance claims will be settled in minutes by agentic AI.

Alena Tsishchanka
Global Customer Advisory Director

Insurers will lean harder into AI-powered actuarial modeling and decisioning.

Stu Bradley
Senior Vice President of Risk, Fraud & Compliance Solutions

Underwriting will move from rule-based to relationship-based AI.

Oana Avramescu
Senior Manager of Insurance Industry Consulting

The accelerating pace of climate change will cause increasing damage.

Thorsten Hein
Global Advisor for Insurance Product Innovation


Insurance in the news at SAS


AI can help insurers tackle their challenges – but they must be able to explain decisions to internal stakeholders, regulators and customers. It’s also crucial to detect when an AI model starts drifting into unfairness as data, behavior or economic conditions change.

Getting that right reduces risk and builds the kind of trust on which this industry depends. As insurance companies scale their use of AI models, transparency and explainability become even more complex – which is where AI safeguards are required to ensure safe model use.

Read the blog post: Trust and transparency in insurance decisions


Learn from insurance peers

Our insurance customers are using data and AI to unlock efficiencies, improve customer experiences, stop churn before it starts, and make better decisions across the business. See how your peers are adopting technology to improve their business.

Read about experiences from SAS insurance customers


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Trends across industries