Zurich Insurance Group has expanded its AI-driven underwriting transformation through a partnership with Cytora, deploying Cytora’s risk digitisation platform across five countries within 90 days and significantly reducing manual underwriting effort.
The insurer plans to extend the rollout to more than 20 markets over the next 16 months as it scales agentic AI capabilities across its commercial insurance operations.
Cytora’s platform serves as an intelligence layer within Zurich’s underwriting workflow, transforming unstructured and multilingual submissions into structured, decision-ready risks aligned with the carrier’s underwriting standards.
Prior to implementation, Zurich underwriters manually reviewed submissions across multiple systems, creating operational bottlenecks and limiting risk processing capacity. The initiative was launched with the aim of reducing quote turnaround times by approximately one hour through greater automation and faster intake processing.
According to Zurich, the deployment has already delivered notable efficiency improvements. Manual triage time fell from 75 minutes to 15 minutes, while digitisation accuracy improved from roughly 70–80% to 98%.
The insurer also reported a significant increase in straight-through processing rates for intake workflows, rising from 10% to 95%, enabling a much larger share of submissions to move through underwriting processes automatically.
Cytora’s multilingual capabilities allow Zurich’s regional businesses to process submissions in local languages without requiring market-specific customisation, supporting faster expansion across international operations.
Zurich selected the platform based on its configurability, commercial insurance focus and ability to integrate with existing systems through a headless architecture.
The deployment represents one of the larger agentic AI implementations in commercial insurance underwriting to date, reflecting growing insurer investment in AI-enabled intake, triage and underwriting automation.
