Ranking: Who Are the Insurance Industry’s AI Talent, Maturity Leaders?

One out of every 50 employees working at a group of 30 large insurers is an AI specialist, according to an analysis published by a benchmarking firm, which ranks Allianz, AXA and Chubb as AI talent leaders.

For London-based Evident, an intelligence platform that specializes in tracking AI adoption across financial services, measures of AI talent leaders include counts of AI specialists in carrier workforces and assessments of carriers’ AI development programs.

An AI talent score is one component of the Evident AI Index for Insurance—a metric developed by Evident to gauge the overall AI maturity of a selected group of large insurance and reinsurance firms.

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The Evident AI Index considers evidence of AI maturity on four dimensions:

• Talent, measuring the number and density of AI and data employees working at an insurer, as well as visible initiatives to develop AI talent.
• Innovation, capturing a measure of insurers’ long-term investment in AI innovation.
• Leadership, measuring the degree of focus on AI from insurance company leaders.
• Transparency, the extent to which insurers focus on responsible AI.

After calculating a combined score across all four pillars, Evident crowned Allianz the AI maturity leader among 30 insurance companies it analyzed. Marking the second year of the publication of this ranking, Evident notes that Allianz leapfrogged last year’s top-ranked insurer, AXA, to claim this year’s top spot.

(Editor’s Note: The Evident report does not reveal overall AI maturity index values or pillar scores for the insurance and reinsurance companies analyzed. It only displays rankings of the index values and pillar assessments.)

The two “composite” insurers, writing both property/casualty and life insurance, also took the No. 1 and 2 spots when Evident ranked scores for the Talent pillar in isolation. The talent dimension of the overall Evident AI maturity score carries a 45% weight in the overall index calculations, the report reveals.

Below, Carrier Management has extracted the overall ranks and pillar ranks for the property/casualty insurers, composite insurers and reinsurers with the 10 best overall rankings based on Evident’s analysis. The complete Evident AI Index for Insurance ranking also includes analysis of 10 life insurers.

Focusing on the Talent pillar, the first chart in this article shows the top five AI talent leaders among the companies that Evident tagged as either composite or P/C insurers, also led by Allianz and AXA. According to the Evident report, Allianz has the largest AI talent pool in the industry—with 28% more AI professionals in its workforce than AXA by Evident’s count.

Offering some observations on talent across the insurance industry, the report says that while overall insurer employment across all functions has declined slightly, “the volume of AI-specialist roles expanded by 32% over the past year.”

In addition, the benchmarking firm reports that 11 of the 30 insurers included in the Index report have a “Chief AI Officer” or equivalent senior leadership position explicitly related to AI—and that two-thirds of those leaders have been in post for less than one year.

Sources and Methods

Evident did not respond to an emailed inquiry from Carrier Management requesting information about the sources of data used to tally the number and roles of AI and data employees for the 30 insurers. The text of the report, however, offers this general description explaining the methods and sources behind the analysis.

• “Data is gathered through a combination of LLM extraction and proprietary machine learning tools that surface key data points within company reporting and public disclosures (including press releases, investor relations materials, group-level website pages, group-level social media accounts, and media interviews with senior leadership), as well as a range of third-party data platforms.
• “Each company was assessed across 68 individual indicators, organized into four pillars.”
• The pillars are: Talent, Innovation, Leadership and Transparency. The weighting scheme for the pillars in 45% Talent, 30% Innovation, 15% Leadership, 10% Transparency (or focus on responsible AI).

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Given the high weighting placed on talent by Evident in calculating overall AI maturity indexes for each insurer (45%), it is unsurprising that three of the top five talent leaders are also ranked among the top five insurers for AI maturity overall. Exceptions are Chubb and USAA.

USAA was last year’s talent leader but fell to fourth place when ranked by Evident on the talent pillar this year. A summary chart in the report offering insight into Evident’s two key measures of AI talent leadership—talent capability and talent development—reveals that USAA remains top-ranked in talent capability but ranks near the bottom (27th) in terms of talent development.

The text of the report explains that USAA, in providing banking, investing, and insurance products to the military, has a natural capability advantage—a talent pipeline of “highly vetted, mission-oriented veterans with proven technical, leadership, cybersecurity, and operational experience.”

Chubb, ranked 12th in overall AI maturity, climbed from eighth place on talent last year to third place this year. While the Evident report does not explain the lift, Chubb Chief Executive Officer Evan Greenberg was clear about the company’s focus on “converting [Chubb’s] businesses to tech-, data- and AI-driven enterprises”—and the role of talent in the conversion—in his annual letter to shareholders, published earlier this year. “This requires engineering talent of different types, working closely together with business professionals and managers who know intimately how the business works and what’s required for change,” he wrote.

Late last year, Chubb also announced the company’s intention to reduce overall headcount by 20% during an investor presentation. “In some businesses, tech and AI will replace what humans do entirely; in others it supports and makes them more productive,” Greenberg wrote in the annual letter.

Moving Up the Ranks

While the “AI narrative” expressed through investor relations materials, press releases and social media is one factor Evident considers for the AI Leadership pillar—a pillar that garners a 15% in the Evident AI Index calculation—Greenberg’s narrative didn’t move the needle on Chubb’s AI Leadership ranking, which fell 8 spots to 19th place. “Our current inquiry increasingly focuses on how insurers report on AI use cases and estimated business impact (ROI),” the Evident report says in a general explanation of its AI leadership assessment (not specific to Chubb).

Chubb’s overall AI Maturity Index vaulted seven spots, fueled mainly by the leap to third place on the Talent pillar.

Still, Chubb’s five-spot jump on the Talent pillar ranking was not as impressive as Zurich’s 10-spot move to seventh place on the talent leaderboard, or AIG’s 13-spot move up to 10th place.

Zurich grew its talent volume 1.6-times faster than the Index average, Evident said.

AIG has “significantly stepped up its AI training programs to support the firm’s aggressive rollout of AI tools across business lines,” Evident reported.

While relativity low rankings on the Innovation and Transparency pillars put AIG in 19th place on the overall AI Maturity Index ranking, Zurich was the biggest overall mover of the cohort of insurers examined by Evident—leaping to fourth place this year, compared to 12th place in 2025.

Ranked No. 1 in Talent, Innovation, and Transparency, Allianz overtook AXA to claim the top spot in this year’s overall AI Maturity ranking. Describing the rise of Allianz as being “driven by broad-based improvement across the Index, Evident notes that “AXA’s move into second place should… be read in relative terms: evidence of Allianz moving faster, not AXA falling back.”

AXA’s second place ranking, including top-three spots in Leadership, Talent, and Transparency, are driven by a strong research profile, a large AI talent base, and vocal executive support for its AI agenda, Evident noted in a LinkedIn post about the report.

As for Allianz, strength in AI talent, an expanding research and venture portfolio, and key tech partnerships all underpin its performance, Evident says.

According to the report, “Allianz has paired that specialist growth with one of the most visible enterprise-wide training strategies in the sector.” As examples, the Evident report cites an extensive AI learning program at Allianz, which includes AI Run, “a 12-week Gen AI and prompting program tailored to employees at different skill levels,” and DataXcellence, which teaches data literacy and analytic. “The scale is material: the AI Run reached more than 150,000 employees across 70 countries, while DataXcellence has supported more than 35,000 employees in data literacy and analytics,” Evident noted.

Like other innovators, Allianz’s lead spot on the Innovation pillar reflects a growing number of research papers. But beyond that, Evident highlighted “real-world applications” of AI at Allianz—”more than 900 registered AI use cases worldwide spanning underwriting, claims, fraud detection, and customer service.”

Offering an example, the Evident report describes Allianz’s AI Insurance Copilot, helping claims handlers gather data, analyze documents, find discrepancies and draft communications.

Explaining Allianz’s lead position on the Transparency pillar, the report references a partnership the global insurer has with Anthropic. According to a joint announcement from the insurer and the AI giant released in January, Allianz and Anthropic are co-developing custom AI claims agents “capable of orchestrating multi-step workflows and automating labor-intensive processes at scale—from intake documentation to claims processing in areas such as motor and health insurance” and related systems that “log every decision, rationale, and data source to address insurance-specific risks and regulatory requirements, ensuring that all AI-driven actions are fully traceable and compliant.”

The Evident report also highlights the presence of a Group Chief Privacy and AI Trust Officer in the C-suite of Allianz as a distinction that explains the Transparency pillar rank.

The P/C Leader: Liberty Mutual

While composite insurers, writing both P/C and life insurance, took the top spots of the Evident AI Index rankings, the nine insurers that Evident classified at P/C insurers aren’t far behind as a group. CM calculated the average AI Maturity rank at 14 for the P/C insurers vs. 12 for nine companies classified as composites. In addition, five of the nine P/C insurers ranked in the top 10 on the Talent pillar.

Progressive is the lowest ranked P/C insurer in terms of its overall AI Maturity Index (ranked 25th) and Talent (ranked 27th). On top of the heap is Liberty Mutual, which jumped two places to fifth place overall, taking the crown as Evident’s top P/C on AI maturity.

Below, CM displays the P/C insurers and composites by ownership type (determined by CM not Evident) for readers interested in comparing mutual and stock company results.

The best-ranked mutual, Liberty, achieved a top-10 ranking on every pillar analyzed in the Evident report: fifth place on Talent, sixth on Transparency, eighth on Innovation and 10th for the Leadership pillar.

The report focuses attention on Liberty’s Leadership ranking because it represents a 11-spot year-over-year jump, noting public comments about the company’s AI approach coming from Chief Information Officer Monica Caldas and Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney, to support the ranking.

(Editor’s Note: See, for example, a March 2026 published by MIT Sloan Management Review, in which Caldas discusses the formation of a responsible AI steerting committee, employee training and an AI helpdesk, “Balancing Innovation and Risk in the Age of AI,” and a November 2025 interview published by McKinsey, in which Sweeney talks about the company’s approach to implementing AI, “A conversation with the CEO of Liberty Mutual.”)

“For a mutual insurer, this external visibility can play a different role than it would for public companies: attracting AI talent, building credibility with commercial clients and distribution partners, and signaling to technology partners that AI has senior-level buy-in,” the text of the Evident report notes.

Evident also noted Liberty’s “visible experimentation” with AI, including the May 2026 launch of a conversational AI auto insurance quoting application on ChatGPT.

The app places Liberty “among the early movers in AI-mediated distribution. The channel remains unproven, but similar activity from Allstate, Aviva, and AXA suggests insurers are already preparing for a future in which discovery, comparison, and purchase journeys are shaped by LLMs and autonomous agents,” the Evident report says.