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Five strategies to transform risk into resilience, writes Ralitsa Nenkova, global insurance leader, Kyndryl Consult

As an industry, insurance exists to mitigate risk. And the risks currently faced by insurers are unprecedented. From more frequent natural catastrophes to overlapping regulations and AI-enabled fraud, insurers are facing challenges that their models, business processes, and systems were never designed to address. Insurers have a quiet history of innovation. In some parts of the industry, sophisticated AI helps determine and refine pricing. Auto insurers use telematics to track willing drivers’ behaviors and customize premiums. Embedded insurance is expected to become a $70 billion market by 2030, compared with about $13 billion today. Parametric insurance is also growing quickly − especially in Asia, where it’s finding promise as a buffer against the financial consequences of extreme weather events.

Kyndryl (NYSE: KD) is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise technology services, offering advisory, implementation, and managed service capabilities to thousands of customers in more than 60 countries. As the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, the company designs, builds, manages, and modernizes the complex information systems that the world depends on every day. For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com.

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The next wave of insurance innovation will be catalyzed by agentic AI – a paradigm shift in the way insurers do business

Ralitsa Nenkova, Kyndryl

Published April 20, 2026

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“Transformation projects no longer need to be drawn-out, multi-year marathons. Instead, select use cases that allow you to demonstrate value quickly”

Ralitsa Nenkova, Kyndryl

The next wave of insurance innovation will be catalyzed by agentic AI – a paradigm shift in the way insurers do business. Agents can generate contextual content and work intelligently across multiple complex, variable workflows to dynamically learn and improve outcomes. Agentic AI gives insurers the opportunity to become more nimble, enabling faster rollout of new products and greatly improved customer experiences. It holds the potential for great efficiencies and more creative use of an organization’s human capital. And it can speed the data integration that makes all this possible. Together, these and other capabilities will create the AI-native insurer of the future – one that is hyper-efficient, insight-driven, and agentic by design. Of course, no insurer becomes AI-native overnight. It’s a journey that begins with these five strategies:

1. Start with the end in mindDefine AI-native for your organization, and map a journey toward that future The journey to becoming AI-native begins with an outcome, not a technology. Agree on the business outcome you’d like to reach, and make sure it’s in line with your organization’s North Star vision. Then, build a pathway to that outcome. Once you’ve mapped it out, look for the initiatives that will bring maximum value with

minimum time and risk. Be willing to consider automation, traditional AI, and agents, and understand that some tasks may need to be accomplished with technology you’ve yet to co-create. Get aligned with your governance and security teams, and start proving out the value bit by bit. 2. Make transformation business as usualFocus on fast, incremental innovation that delivers quick value Transformation projects no longer need to be drawn-out, multi-year marathons. Instead, select use cases that allow you to demonstrate value quickly, building credibility, ROI, and permission to continue forward. A good early use case simplifies a complex process. If the use case is too small, it may qualify as a success without driving significant value. If it’s overly big and complex, save it for later, after your organization has built up the expertise and culture to make it work.

3. Modernize your existing technology ecosystem with AIUse AI as an orchestration layer to harmonize your current IT environment Agentic AI provides a fast and efficient option for modernizing technology environments. Use agentic AI to read code written in older languages and then create APIs that serve as a bridge between the old application and a modern interface. Agents also allow enterprises to be more agnostic about where their data sits. If agents know what data is available and where it’s stored, and if those sources are trusted, then the data can be extracted and exposed to agents in a modern and scalable way.

In the case of determining Scope 3 emissions, for example, agentic enablement can greatly streamline, accelerate, and automate the data collection process. It can bring end-to-end visibility of Scope 3 impacts throughout the value chain, and provide the insight necessary to amplify what’s working and make changes where necessary. 4. Build transformational resilienceEnsure innovations are introduced from a foundation of strong regulatory, compliance, and security capabilities Agentic innovation places new demands on regulatory, compliance, and security functions. For regulatory and compliance teams, the first impulse may be to introduce a slew of controls specifically for agents. But that doesn’t scale when insurers are operating in multiple jurisdictions around the globe. Instead, organizations need to make a shift in mindset. It’s not about rules. It’s about providing secure guardrails, and giving agents and people the freedom to work and innovate within those boundaries.

Security needs to be front and center in any agentic innovation, especially as quantum computing moves closer to reality. In the case of a data breach, you may find that some of your agents stop performing. More worrying, and extremely difficult to detect: a subtle interference with your data that manipulates your agents, changing the trajectory of how the business makes key decisions. 5. Adopt AI-fluent leadershipRethink your operating model to support AI-native ways of working, including upskilling and evolving your team’s roles At many enterprises, the cultural hurdles to becoming

AI-native are just as high as the technical ones. If your teams aren’t using the AI tools already available to them – perhaps Co-Pilot or Gemini or Chat GPT – they may not be eager to adopt the more targeted technologies you’re planning to roll out. Leaders need to change too, because AI will affect their business more profoundly than they may expect. They’ll need to learn to use AI themselves, of course. They’ll also have to get comfortable being a bit more in the weeds, without lapsing into micromanagement. To reimagine how the business operates, leaders will need to understand their business at a finer level of detail: which areas are working well, which are stuck, and who’s best-suited to make fixes. Agentic AI is evolving quickly, and for most insurers, the journey to becoming AI-native will take some time. The good news is that it’s possible to make significant progress quite quickly, showing real value and creating the momentum to continue. Get future-ready and begin your journey toward AI adoption here.

Building an AI-ready culture

Source: Kyndryl

of insurance leaders agree that AI will completely transform roles and responsibilities at their organization within 12 months

85%

of leaders say their organization’s workforce is currently ready to successfully leverage AI in the workplace

29%

Redefining the AI-led approach in 2026

Source: Kyndryl

Among organizations not yet seeing positive returns from AI, blame integration difficulties

35%

of insurers have more technology pilots − including AI − than they can realistically scale

68%