Zurich Insurance Scales Agentic AI After Cytora Success

Zurich announces it has successfully completed a “breakthrough” deployment of Cytora’s agentic-AI powered risk digitisation platform across five countries in only 90 days. 

As a result of its success, the programme is to be scaled in 20 markets across a longer timeline of 16 months.

The insurer now operates a fully integrated, end-to-end underwriting model, with Cytora serving as the upstream, headless intelligence layer. 

The platform automatically converts unstructured and multi-language submissions into structured, decision-ready risks that align with global underwriting standards.

Armin Schaefer, Head of Customer & Digital IT, Commercial Insurance and Project Director at Zurich Insurance, explains: “Cytora united cutting-edge tech and a winning team to deliver fast, collaborative, high-quality results at unprecedented speed.”

Prior to deploying the technology, commercial underwriters at Zurich were manually reading, reviewing and interpreting every single risk received. 

This restricted their capacity to focus on only a fraction of submissions, without a consistent way of prioritising them.

Underwriters were also forced to interact with multiple systems, which slowed down decision-making.

To solve this, Zurich sought a solution to reduce time to quote by 60 minutes through automating decision-ready risks, enabling teams to process greater volumes of business. 

The primary challenge lay in the heterogeneous nature of incoming risk submissions. The insurer needed these to conform to its own view of risk while simultaneously accommodating local market differences.

Zurich selected Cytora due to its advanced configurability, commercial insurance expertise and headless digitisation layer, which offered a multi-language, unstructured data solution capable of rapid scaling.

Measurable operational gains

By prioritising deployment speed and redesigning how risks are digitised and triaged globally, Zurich has delivered immediate operational gains in speed, quality and scalability. 

The transformation has successfully reduced manual triage times by 80% from 75 minutes down to just 15 minutes, while simultaneously driving digitisation accuracy up from a previous baseline of 70-80% to a current level of 98%. 

Furthermore, the business has seen its intake straight-through processing rates surge from 10% to 95%, establishing a highly repeatable deployment model that can be utilised for broader global expansion.

The technology enables Zurich to achieve rapid deployment alongside the control needed to author its target view of risk globally, while meeting the needs of each country of operation. 

Outputs are delivered in local languages out-of-the-box, enabling business units to operate with native-language insight in a globally deployed tool. 

This supports faster processing without requiring local custom builds.

Accelerating global scale

The partnership establishes a new framework for how large-scale commercial insurers implement automation across multiple territories in parallel, avoiding traditional months-long rollouts for every new territory or line of business.

The collaboration highlights how advanced digital tools can be embedded directly into complex commercial insurance streams to remove friction for underwriters.

Richard Hartley, CEO of Cytora, says: “Through this partnership we have created a model for the rapid and effective deployment of agentic AI powered automation across Zurich’s global operations.

“Huge efficiency savings have been achieved without compromise.

“Zurich can launch new markets and products with minimal setup while adapting to local requirements – delivering consistent, accurate, decision-ready output every time. 

“This partnership showcases the power of agentic AI to deliver tangible and immediate results on a global scale.”