Zurich Scales Agentic AI to Five Countries in 90 Days Cutting Manual Risk Processing Time by 80%

Zurich Insurance has completed a breakthrough 90‑day deployment of Cytora’s agentic AI‑powered risk digitization platform across five countries. The programme will now scale to more than 20 markets over 16 months. 

Zurich now operates a fully integrated, end‑to‑end underwriting model, with Cytora serving as the upstream, headless intelligence layer. With Cytora, Zurich is able to automatically convert unstructured and multi-language submissions into structured, decision-ready risks aligned with Zurich’s global underwriting standards. 

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

• Manual triage time has fallen by 80% from 75 minutes to 15 minutes
• Digitization accuracy has increased from 70-80% to 98%
• Intake Straight-Through Processing has increased from 10% to 95%
• Established a repeatable deployment model for global expansion.

Prior to deploying Cytora, Zurich’s underwriters were manually reading, reviewing and interpreting every single risk that they received, resulting in a capacity to focus on only a fraction of the submissions received, and no consistent way of prioritising them. Underwriters were also forced to interact with multiple systems, slowing down decision‑making. 

To solve this problem, Zurich sought out a solution that would reduce time to quote by 60 minutes through automating decision ready risks, enabling underwriters to process greater volumes of business. The challenge lay in the heterogeneous nature of incoming risk submissions and the need for them to conform to Zurich’s own view of risk while accommodating local differences. This required a platform that can transform ‘submissions’ into ‘decision-ready risks’ across multiple countries in parallel, without the traditional months-long rollout for every new territory or line of business.

Zurich selected Cytora due to its advanced configurability, commercial insurance expertise and headless digitization layer, presenting a multi-language, unstructured data solution that could be scaled quickly. Cytora enabled Zurich to achieve both rapid deployment and control to author the target view of risk of Zurich globally, as well as meet the needs of each country of operation. Outputs are delivered in local languages out‑of‑the‑box, enabling Zurich’s business units to operate with native‑language insight in a globally deployed tool – supporting faster without the need for local custom builds.

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

Richard Hartley, CEO of Cytora, said: “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.”