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Gone are the clichés and dusty paperwork often associated with the insurance industry! The cycle of major change that began a few years ago is continuing and accelerating. AI and Cybersecurity are not the only challenges facing CIOs today. IT underpins all business processes, from sales to risk assessment and prediction. IT drives innovation, differentiation and business. At the heart of these exciting and complex upheavals, the CIO plays a central role, steering the transformation. If he is insuring, it is he who is foreshadowing the insurers of tomorrow.
By Samuel Revenu, co-founder and CEO of Abraxio. A former CIO in the insurance industry, he shares his experience and daily exchanges with CIOs and those involved in Digital transformation.
It’s impossible not to be fascinated by the insurance industry, especially if you’re a technophile! Information technology (IT) is omnipresent in all the activities of an insurer: sales, customer relations and claims management, risk assessment and modeling, rate calculation and the continuous adaptation of offers. Alongside banking and e-commerce, insurance is the sector in which the information system and the challenges of digitalization are most prevalent. The value chain can be digitized – and is being digitized – from A to Z. The upheavals are recent, the evolution cycles increasingly rapid, and the transformation far from complete.
What’s essential to understand in the relationship between this mass market and digital technology is that today, IT has become a major vector of innovation, and therefore of differentiation and business. The products offered by insurers to their customers are often standard and complex. Underwriting is a constrained purchase. But what simplifies the sales process, improves the user experience and makes it possible to better price risk is technology. Technological choices and the advances they induce are crucial to differentiating between competitors and adding value to offers.
The subject of IT is therefore central. This is nothing new, but competitive pressures are intensifying, and the sector is accelerating its transformation. By looking to the future and anticipating regulatory, technological and societal developments, CIOs are steering this change: they are at the strategic crossroads of all the company’s businesses and innovation management. Their role is cardinal. The challenges they face are intellectually fascinating. And the stakes are high! At the head of their in-house Teams, often reinforced by external Contractors, the CIO will enable insurers to position themselves sustainably at the cutting edge of innovation and customer satisfaction. Provided, of course, that they can deliver!
Resilience remains the foundation, AI becomes the driving force
It’s no secret: this business sector is highly regulated. With the escalation of cyber attacks, and the heightened awareness of digital sovereignty issues linked to the geopolitical context, the pace of European regulation is crescendoing: RGPD in 2018, NIS 1 and 2 directives in 2022 and 2023, EU AI Act in 2024, entry into force of the DORA regulation in January 2025… These texts framing the management of ICT-related risks and protecting customer data have a direct impact on CIOs. They have had to reorganize and adapt their operations around compliance and Cybersecurity.
The data culture – from data collection and processing to data protection – already deeply rooted in this sector, has been further consolidated in recent years. However, key questions remain. Data hosting in a sovereign European cloud is a key concern. So, if initiatives emerge within the EU, they will offer a real opportunity for insurance players.
Cybersecurity is more than ever a central issue for insurance CIOs. A culture of risk and compliance must become an integral part of the Teams’ DNA, and be a hallmark of all the company’s Projects and businesses, at all levels, strategic and operational.
The fact remains that, after years focused on compliance and resilience, it is AI that is emerging as “THE” must-have topic of 2026. How can and will Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its promise of breakthroughs, reshape the industry’s digital transformation?
Admittedly, its use arouses very antagonistic reactions, according to the study on digitalization and AI in insurance, carried out in March 2025 by Argus de l’assurance, in partnership with Capgemini. But beyond agentic AI and its chatbots that automate customer relations by making them autonomous, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable better risk assessment, thanks to more accurate data analysis. In this way, AI tools will redefine the role of actuaries, refining calculations and forecasts.
Today, insurers are still experimenting and groping. But the race is on. In the years to come, AI will become the next weapon of differentiation in an ultra-competitive market: properly used by humans, once the questions and contradictions it raises have been resolved, it will further improve the quality of customer service and operational efficiency with automated file processing; it will make it possible to offer more appropriate rates and increase employee performance.
With the densification of the business and technological ecosystem, interoperability between systems will continue to intensify. Insurers are already part of an environment in which they interact with distributors, partners and peers.
The need to integrate APIs into information systems is nothing new. As a lever for digital transformation, interoperability fosters agility and innovation. However, it requires an overhaul of technological infrastructures to enable them to communicate effectively with each other. For the sector’s incumbents, whose information systems are aging, openness is a challenge that start-ups entering the business do not have to face. Here again, companies that know how to adapt are more likely to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment.
HR to the CIO’s rescue
And what about the CIO? What are their specific needs in the face of these profound changes? To effectively steer the transformation, with his Teams and the company’s business departments, he needs to strengthen his expertise and sharpen his Resources: strategic, within the Comex; legal, in tandem with the legal department; risk culture, alongside the CISOs; and HR.
To keep up with the pace of change and get all employees on board, including baby boomers and the less digital natives among them, he needs to rely on his company’s HR departments. Because the transformation of information systems and of the CIO-RSI profession demanded by digitization and the challenges described above requires change management support.
Regular training programs will enable us to maintain and upgrade the skills of those who might otherwise be left by the wayside, while their experience and knowledge of the insurance business remain an intrinsic asset to the sector.
Armed to meet these challenges, the CIOs are foreshadowing the insurers of tomorrow: innovators who champion customer satisfaction.
Samuel Revenu
– CEO, Abraxio