Inside AXA’s Growing Forward plan: how the insurer expects up to £600m a year from AI

The useful part

At its Investor Day on the 15th September, chief executive Thomas Buberl unveiled "Growing Forward," the group's strategic plan for 2027 to 2029. He explained the name as a deliberate double meaning: continuity ("going forward") combined with an explicit focus on gaining market share ("growing forward"). AXA's presentation describes it as pre-tax value, net of the implementation costs and the extra running costs those tools bring.

How it works

• His answer: most insurers don't have both the financial means and the workforce buy-in to make AI pay off at this scale.
• Asked about growth through AXA's agency network, Buberl described a recent meeting where agents were pushing him for faster access to AI tools, not resisting them.
• The wider backdrop: AI is already showing up in UK GDP AXA's bet on AI value creation lands at a moment when the technology is doing measurable work in the wider UK economy too.
• For an industry that has spent the past couple of years running AI pilots cautiously, that kind of macro tailwind adds weight to the argument that the spending is starting to show up on the other side of...
• Still, the contrast lands at an odd moment: one wing of the AI industry pushing for a slower pace of development, while a major insurer puts a firm number on how much faster it plans to move.

What to take from it

Pointedly, he named Microsoft's Copilot as an example of the wrong way to think about it: "The key is are you able to engage your employees and your agents to use it," he told analysts, not whether you've licensed the best tool. In commercial underwriting, AXA wants AI-augmented submission triage and risk scoring to be standard practice for its highest-value opportunities by 2029. The UK is different, he said, specifically because it's "much more in a broker market," where capacity can move in and out more easily.

Example or evidence

• Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, unrelated to AXA, published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier".
• Buberl's comment on the UK's broker market is a reminder that the company is watching distribution structures as closely as its own technology rollout, and UK brokers and insurers will want to keep an eye...
• Amodei isn't arguing for a halt to AI development, and his concerns are aimed at frontier labs racing to build more powerful general-purpose models, not at insurers deploying narrower, task-specific tools...
• It's live, and it's already everywhere." Why AXA thinks it can win where others can't One analyst asked Buberl directly whether rivals copying AXA's AI-driven retention push could erode the advantage over time.

Details worth keeping

It isn't a gross saving that ignores what the technology costs to deploy. On the call, Guillaume Borie, AXA's Global Head of Finance, Strategy, Underwriting, Risk & Technology, made the same point in plainer terms, describing AXA's operating model as one built to manage those implementation and running costs directly. As he put it: "AI today doesn't sit in a lab within AXA.

Related coverage

• Insurancebusinessmag: The group's new strategic plan signals discipline at AXA XL and AI deployment across underwriting and pricing
• Insurancebusinessmag: The group's new strategic plan signals discipline at AXA XL and AI deployment across underwriting and pricing
• Insurancebusinessmag: The insurer's vendor-agnostic hub is already live in five entities, with AXA XL among those building claims and email applications
• Insurancebusinessmag: The insurer's vendor-agnostic hub is already live in five entities, with AXA XL among those building claims and email applications
• Scmp: Hong Kong's leader has identified financial services, innovation and technology, and education as three key new growth drivers ahead of the unveiling of the city's inaugural five-year development blueprint...