Videos
Specialty Insurance, AI, and Closing the Protection Gap
Insights
- Specialty insurance is attracting new sources of capital, enabling the industry to address increasingly complex and emerging risks.
- The convergence of AI, data, compute, and ecosystem capabilities is accelerating the shift from experimentation to operational deployment.
- Agentic AI can help insurers close the protection gap by combining human expertise with intelligent automation to improve underwriting efficiency and risk coverage.
Karthik Balasubramanian, Portfolio Head, Insurance at Infosys explores how specialty insurance is evolving to meet the demands of a rapidly changing risk landscape. He explains how new capital models, including participation from non-traditional investors, are creating opportunities to address bespoke and emerging risks that require specialized underwriting approaches. The discussion highlights how advances in AI are becoming practical as organizations combine intelligent models with the supporting ecosystem of data, compute, and storage capabilities. He also examines how agentic AI can augment underwriters by blending human expertise with automation to streamline risk assessment, pricing, and policy binding. Looking ahead, he argues that this combination of human judgment and AI-driven efficiency could help insurers address the industry's growing protection gap and extend coverage to a broader range of emerging risks.
Karthik Balasubramanian:
I think the availability of a platform to deploy innovative capital to meet emerging risks is one big driving factor in the speciality insurance segment. For example, if you take the newer partnerships, thanks to the London Bridge 2 facility in the Lloyd’s of London market, for example, an entity like Blackstone, which was in a different industry, can now deploy capital to actually address specialty and bespoke risks in the insurance segment.
I think the promise of AI and the potential of AI is well researched and it's well observed. What is exciting to the leaders of today is the coming together of the surround system and entire ecosystem in terms of whether it is compute, whether it is storage, whether it is data and all of that is coming together along with the potential of AI and the ability to actualize the AI through all of these other surround factors. I think that is what is being felt by the leaders of today. Now at the same time, people were just experimenting with it as of last year, but certainly there are people who have moved ahead into the operational phase of it.
Specialty insurance by definition even if you categorize it and bucket it into broad buckets like excess liability or high value property, etc. Each individual risk covered has its own nuanced characteristics, which leads to a very individualized approach to assessment of the risk and pricing the risk. Now in doing this, as I explained it, it's clearly today a very manually intensive, dependent on manual knowledge. But with the developments in newer technology like the agentic AI offerings, I think we can create a solution which blends the best and melds together both human intelligence along with the power of AI technologies, which will result in faster processing, more efficient and effective quoting, and more clean binding of these policies, covering more risk because there’s a huge protection gap in the space in the market. Partly because these risks are emerging risks, but partly also because we do not have the infrastructure to process all the submissions which come in from brokers. So there's a lot of protection gap there and that's another key aspect which can be addressed thanks to the combination of that human in the loop along with AI to effectively cover more risk.
