The opening keynote at Connections 2026 borrowed a line that sums up where the industry stands: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. In the UK, some insurers, MGAs and Lloyd’s syndicates already run AI in production; others are still deciding where to start. This year’s sessions, now available on demand, made one thing clear: agentic insurance is no longer a concept. It is shipping.
The technology isn’t the bottleneck any more
The past year has brought more change in AI than perhaps all previous years combined, and agents can now carry out complex tasks accurately over long periods. Yet the industry’s problems are familiar: slow growth, low productivity, high distribution costs and a slow pace of change. In the UK, add claims inflation, more frequent severe weather and a regulator focused on customer outcomes. The keynote was candid: technology is rarely what holds insurers back. Organizations are. AI asks us to change the way we change.
In an agentic world, the system of record matters more, not less. Guidewire’s platform will treat AI agents as first-party consumers, working alongside people with the same data, APIs, business rules and controls. That matters in the UK, where regulators apply existing rules to AI rather than writing new ones. Consumer Duty expects firms to evidence good outcomes, the Senior Managers & Certification Regime makes accountability personal, and operational resilience rules leave little room for fragile systems. Agents bolted onto fragmented legacy technology won’t pass that test. A governed, modern core will.
The London market is already proving it
The headline announcement was Guidewire’s agreement to acquire hyperexponential, the agentic underwriting specialist with deep roots in the London market. The goal is simple: less time on mundane tasks, more on differentiated judgement. Across the product lifecycle, agents can now build product structures from broker brochures, turn regulatory change into rules weeks faster, adjust pricing plans automatically and triage submissions using emails, attachments and account history. For UK teams working through pricing practices rules and fair value assessments, or London market underwriters buried in broker submissions, that is time handed back to the work that matters.
That shift is already paying off in the London market. Beazley, the specialist insurer operating across Lloyd’s, the US and Europe, was named one of three winners of the 2026 Guidewire Innovation Awards, alongside Definity and RCIS, and was recognised on the main stage.
Working with Capgemini, Beazley modernised product development, broker submissions and billing on an end-to-end, integrated Guidewire platform built to support complex underwriting judgement. By using Advanced Product Designer and automating manual billing processes, it has cut product launch timelines from months to weeks and improved operational efficiency by 20–25%. Fewer manual errors mean underwriters can make faster, higher-quality decisions for their broker partners, and Beazley now has a connected foundation for growth. For a market still weighed down by legacy systems and manual processing, it is a clear example of what modernisation makes possible.
Speed customers feel, control regulators trust
Claims is where insurers keep their promise. Concierge, a new AI-native product, held a natural conversation with a policyholder at First Notice of Loss and filed a complete, straight-through-ready claim into ClaimCenter in real time. When a named storm brings thousands of claims in a few days, that consistency matters. Pro Navigator, embedded in ClaimCenter, answers questions from an insurer’s own guidelines, suggests next steps and acts through specialised agents. At Gore Mutual, tasks that took three to five minutes now take 20 to 30 seconds.
Agents are only as valuable as an insurer’s ability to trust them. Agent Studio lets teams build, test, govern and monitor agents before and after go-live, which is exactly the evidence risk committees and accountable senior managers will ask for. A session with OpenAI added two principles worth adopting: protect first against irreversible actions, and reserve human review for genuinely high-risk decisions to avoid approval fatigue.
Go-live is the starting line
Two sessions featuring UK insurers tackled the question every insurer faces after migration: what next? At Tokio Marine HCC International, CIO Nicki Tang joined Richard White and Craig Field of Alchemy Technology Services, part of NTT DATA, to share how a managed service has kept the insurer ahead on Guidewire. Nicki’s starting point was direct: “We needed a partner, not a vendor.”
The results speak for themselves: more than 100 structured knowledge-transfer sessions, three Guidewire version upgrades delivered on the live platform and 99.5% SLA performance. Craig described a service that keeps evolving, from stabilising to simplifying to becoming data-led and opening the door to innovation. Richard summed it up: a managed service turns a fast-moving platform into a value-creation partnership.
Markel took the same idea further. In a Capgemini-led panel, “Built to Scale: Making AI and Guidewire Work Together for Accelerated Growth,” Markel CIO Rob Raus and Prashant Shastri explored how to use Guidewire as a scalable foundation for ongoing business value once the cloud migration is complete. In Markel’s view, a modern core does far more than replace legacy systems. It increases operational throughput through automation, creates an AI-ready foundation for future use cases, connects a broader partner ecosystem and improves the experience for insureds and brokers. The most practical lesson was about sequence: put proven patterns for scaling in place first, then add more AI capabilities.
Taken together, Connections 2026 points to four moves for UK insurers:
- Fix the foundation first. Agentic AI delivers most on a modern, governed core.
- Keep people in charge. Agents do the groundwork; underwriters and claims handlers make the calls.
- Design for trust. Explainability and auditability are what move AI from pilot to production under UK regulation.
- Plan beyond go-live. Knowledge transfer, governance and proven patterns for scaling keep the platform, and the people, moving forward as more AI is added.
The insurers that thrive over the next decade will be the ones that rethink how work flows between people and agents, and build enough trust to let agents act. As climate change, regulation and cost pressures reshape the UK market, that may be what keeps insurance available and affordable for the next generation.