Zurich Insurance completes a 90-day deployment of Cytora's agentic AI-powered risk digitisation platform across five countries, cutting manual risk processing time by 80 per cent. The programme is now set to 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 intelligence layer. The platform automatically converts unstructured and multi-language submissions into structured, decision-ready risks aligned with Zurich's global underwriting standards. Operational gains reported by the insurer include manual triage time falling from 75 minutes to 15 minutes, digitisation accuracy increasing from between 70 and 80 per cent to 98 per cent, and intake straight-through processing rising from 10 per cent to 95 per cent. Zurich says the deployment has also established a repeatable model for global expansion. Prior to deploying Cytora, Zurich's underwriters were manually reading, reviewing and interpreting every risk they received, limiting capacity and leaving no consistent way of prioritising submissions. Underwriters were also forced to move between multiple systems, slowing decision-making. Zurich sought a solution that would cut time to quote by 60 minutes through automating decision-ready risks, enabling underwriters to handle higher volumes of business. The challenge lay in the heterogeneous nature of incoming submissions and the need for them to conform to Zurich's view of risk while accommodating local differences, without the traditional months-long rollout for each new territory or line of business. The insurer selected Cytora for its configurability, commercial insurance expertise and headless digitisation layer. Outputs are delivered in local languages out-of-the-box, allowing Zurich's business units to operate with native-language insight in a globally deployed tool and broadening the available underwriter talent pool beyond English-only speakers. Cytora's platform operates as the upstream layer to Zurich's Z-Horizon+ system, where underwriters assess, quote and bind risks, or pass them to specialist underwriting platforms. Armin Schaefer, head of customer and digital IT for commercial insurance, and project director at Zurich Insurance, says: "Cytora united cutting-edge tech and a winning team to deliver fast, collaborative, high-quality results at unprecedented speed." Richard Hartley, CEO of Cytora, says: "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."
