Sam Evans, Founding Partner at Eos Ventures, has written for Insurance CIO Outlook Europe on how artificial intelligence, and agentic AI in particular, is moving from the edges of the insurance business to the heart of the value chain, and what that shift means for insurers, founders and investors.
Drawing on his background leading the global deal advisory business for insurance at KPMG, where he worked on more than $75 billion of transactions across markets including Australia, Hong Kong, Switzerland and the UK, Sam sets out why he believes the industry has reached a genuine tipping point. He points to a clear shift in the market, with the adoption and funding of AI native companies both rising quickly, and to the Gallagher InsurTech report for Q1 2026, which found that 95 per cent of funding flowed to AI focused businesses.
On the nature of that change, Sam explains that insurers have moved from limited testing around the edges to widespread adoption across core workflows. Where earlier technology delivered incremental productivity gains, foundational models and agentic AI now enable true operational transformation. He is careful to distinguish agentic AI from systems that simply generate text or recognise images, describing it instead as autonomous agents able to execute multistep workflows from end to end.
Sam also addresses the data problem that has long held the industry back. Insurance has always wrestled with messy, unstructured data, and earlier tools only partly solved it: optical character recognition struggles once document formats change, while robotic process automation depends on rigid templates that cannot cope with the exception heavy nature of insurance paperwork. Large language models and agentic AI, he argues, finally remove that decades old constraint by reasoning about what a document means regardless of its format, acting as an intelligent layer between unstructured inputs and structured core systems. The lasting advantage, in his view, will belong to companies that combine these models with structured proprietary data, because access to data, and the insights drawn from it, is what creates real differentiation.
Turning to underwriting, Sam describes how agents can invert the balance between data extraction and judgement. Rather than underwriters spending most of their time on manual extraction, triage and administration, agents can ingest submissions, pull the relevant points from hundreds of pages, run automated gap analysis against appetite guidelines and hand the underwriter a synthesised risk profile. He is clear that the human stays in the loop: the aim is to free underwriters for the high value decisions, not to replace them. He cites projections that AI adoption in underwriting could rise from 14 per cent today to 70 per cent by 2028.
In claims, Sam sees similar potential. Straightforward, high frequency claims can be handled with little or no human touch, with agents extracting data from first notice of loss, verifying cover, assessing damage from images and calculating standard settlements, while more complex claims are triaged and routed to the right specialist with a summary already prepared. He notes too that agentic AI strengthens fraud detection, spotting subtle patterns across large volumes of claims that traditional methods can miss.
Looking ahead, Sam’s message to insurers is direct. The operational case for agentic AI is proven, he says, and the mandate now is to move from exploration to enterprise wide integration. He does not pretend it will be simple, pointing to the cultural change, training, talent, modern data infrastructure and governance that real adoption demands, and he cautions against the instinct to build everything in house, favouring a balanced approach built on partnerships with early stage, workflow specific AI companies. His conclusion is that the moment for committed action has arrived, because the gap between the leaders and everyone else is likely to widen exponentially rather than incrementally.
Read the full article in Insurance CIO Outlook Europe: https://www.insuranceciooutlookeurope.com/leadership-perspective/sam-evans-nid-1842.html
