Overnight, humanity stands at the precipice of an AI revolution
Gareth Stokes
It boggles the mind that it has taken humanity until 2025 to begin contemplating the threat that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to life, the universe, and everything (with apologies to Douglas Adams).
A dramatic and wide-reaching change
The Oxford English Dictionary describes a revolution as “a dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes, or operation.” By that measure, AI is not just part of a revolution, it is the revolution. It is dismantling and reconfiguring the fundamentals of how we think, learn, and create.
The pervasiveness of AI, and its co-pilots automation and machine learning, is undeniable in the financial services sector. Case in point, your writer attended two insurance and investment events this week, only to discover each presentation dripping with AI. The latest application of this technology is challenging the status quo at unimaginable speed and scale, moving us from the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) or Web 3.0 to something more sinister, perhaps an Age of Intelligence.
For now, presenter after presenter stride to the podium, virtually or in the real world, to explain how AI will work alongside humans to improve productivity and service. These presenters speak with authority because probing the future too deeply would prove unsettling. They talk evolution, a scenario in which human and machine work together. But what if revolution means humanity gets sidelined?
A standout moment from this week’s presentation overload was a webinar featuring Rupert Nicolay, a Director at Microsoft’s Worldwide Financial Services. Nicolay outlined how Microsoft, one of the global leaders in AI development and adoption, is helping to elevate Tier 1 insurers using AI.
How AI is reshaping insurance
Nicolay was presenting on the theme ‘AI is reshaping insurance’ for an FAnews webinar, sponsored by Sapiens. Referencing a survey conducted early 2024, he said large insurers had a moderately high expectation of human efforts in claims, sales, and underwriting, and some of the back office function, being removed five- to 10-years from today. And more than half of respondents hinted that there would be no human involvement in back office and policy servicing by 2035.
“There are a lot of assumptions that underpin these findings, not least of which what the insurance policy looks like,” Nicolay said. The evolution of admin systems, customer engagement, and regulation will all play a part in the eventual outcome from widespread AI adoption and integration. Turning to present day, the presenter identified four AI use cases where insurers were achieving impressive returns on investment including call centres, claims, underwriting, and compliance.
Contact centres are leveraging AI to personalise customer interactions and improve the call centre agent’s understanding of complex products. “AI has provided the ability to summarise [call centre interaction] history and surface it to the agent that the customer is dealing with right now,” Nicolay said. AI is also being deployed to assist with sentiment analysis during stressful calls and / or search and return product information in contextualised natural language, in real time.
Where the rubber hits the road…
Claims are where the rubber hits the road for insurers. AI is already being used as an underpin for automation in various claims-related functions including auto-population of notes and actions from customer or broker calls, and the population of ‘first notification of loss’ forms. Another common application is identifying outstanding claims requirements and generating automated requests for such information to be supplied. AI tools, using machine learning and voice biometrics, are able to flag stress patterns, inconsistent speech, or suspicious caller identities, adding a new layer of fraud detection in call-centre-heavy environments too.
Underwriting use cases see insurers leveraging modern AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation to extract critical information from unstructured data sets. One example involves non-life underwriters who have to sift through reams of documents that are submitted alongside brokers’ commercial insurance quote requests just to decide whether to quote or not. “The ability [to use AI] to work with unstructured information and pull useful information out has been very useful to some; it has seen many [general insurers] achieve a much faster turnaround back to their brokers,” Nicolay said.
Before launching into the compliance and risk discussion, it is worth noting that any repeatable admin or compliance task can be automated. And if it can be automated, that automation can be enhanced by AI. Increasingly, insurers are automating their compliance requirements at the customer level, and then using additional automation to handle the reporting associated with that compliance.
AI adoption will have a sweeping impact
The key message for insurers is to begin thinking about how AI is incorporated into systems and processes on a 10-year view A Nicolay said, “It is necessary to think about the long-term [it will] have a lot of implications for how you design your products, for how you engage your regulator from a compliance perspective, and so forth.”
AI dominated the programme over the two-day-long 2025 PSG Financial Services Annual Conference too. Jeanette Marais, CEO of Momentum Group, used her 20-minute speaking slot to acknowledge how AI is reshaping financial planning by offering powerful tools that enable personalisation at scale, reduce administrative burden, and enhance behavioural coaching. With South African clients being tech-savvy but largely underinsured and financially illiterate, AI also offers a way to bridge the advice gap.
Momentum has already deployed AI in tools like Fast Track, which uses biometric scanning to streamline underwriting, and is piloting empathy-tracking software that analyses service interactions to improve emotional connection with clients. The next frontier includes behavioural diagnostics powered by AI that track patterns across millions of data points, helping advisers predict and counteract emotional financial decisions such as premature investment switches or retirement miscalculations.
Machine intelligence meets human heart
Marais positioned AI as an enabler to automate routine work and surface deeper insights while allowing human advisers to focus on empathy, judgement, and personalised advice. “The real value of AI comes when machine intelligence meets human heart,” Marais said. Future clients will expect digital convenience, but they will continue to value relationships built on trust and understanding. The good news for advisers and brokers is that their role will be amplified by AI, not diminished. Emotional intelligence will remain the true differentiator.
Peter Kempen, Head of Distribution at Coronation, closed day one of the PSG event by exploring how AI is reshaping active asset management. He described how early 2000s systems were siloed and manually intensive, preventing portfolio managers from gaining real-time insights. Today, by contrast, “models can analyse the correlation between asset classes and provide portfolio managers with a real-time view of what is actually happening.” This enhances responsiveness and resilience.
Kempen explained that AI can deliver deeper predictive capabilities and liquidity stress testing, describing it as part of a broader shift from manual, error-prone processes toward integrated, cloud-powered systems. On AI’s current impact, Kempen identified four key areas including automation, predictive power, research productivity, and unstructured data analysis. “One of the biggest advantages that AI has is the ability to synthesise and analyse vast amounts of unstructured data,” he said, referencing sources like earnings calls, social media, and news.
Judgement, intuitions, and contextual reasoning
AI frees up humans for higher-level thinking by automating routine tasks such as trade execution and report generation. While AI offers strengths in data processing, pattern recognition, and emotional discipline, Kempen argued that humans still excel in contextual reasoning, intuition, and judgement. “AI will always provide an answer, even if there should not be one,” he quipped, suggesting the future of asset management lies not in man versus machine, but in their intelligent integration.
There was so much more to cover on day two, but your writer has run out of column space. As a body of work, these various presentations suggest there is no turning back from AI. If you work in a call centre, or in financial advising, or as an investment management, or in underwriting – AI has become embedded with astonishing speed. In this context, the ‘threat of an AI revolution’ mentioned in the opening paragraph is moot. You cannot lose sleep over how AI might disrupt your sector at some future point because the disruption is already well underway. Your challenge, should you accept it, is to figure out how you respond.
Legacy acolytes will get left behind
If you cling to legacy ways of working you risk finding yourself outpaced not by machines, but by your peers who embrace machines as collaborators. Put differently, the future belongs to those who can balance machine intelligence with human wisdom. As AI systems become more capable, you will have to lean on your contextual understanding and emotional intelligence to stand out from the crowd. The AI revolution is underway, but humanity should prevail.
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