Jiali Digital Intelligence Transformation, Listed Insurance Companies' AI Competition Enters Deep Water Zone

The insurance industry is undergoing an AI-led “intelligent restructuring.” Recently, China Life, Ping An, PICC, People’s Insurance of China (PICC), New China Life, and China Taiping—all leading insurers in China—have successively submitted their 2025 performance report cards. On April 1, a Beijing Business Daily reporter reviewed the information and found that “digital and intelligent transformation” has evolved from a strategic slogan into real operational investment by listed insurers. In an era when artificial intelligence is developing rapidly, many insurers have discussed the building of financial technology capabilities in settings such as annual reports and earnings briefings, including topics related to AI technology development and applications. Unlike the prior shift toward technological digitization of single business lines, today’s “AI+” covers the entire business process, including both insurers’ customer-facing (C-end) operations and internal employee workflows.

AI penetration across end-to-end business processes

According to annual report data, many leading insurers have increased the strategic weight of AI in their top-level design. At the same time, AI technology is breaking through traditional process bottlenecks, enabling a shift from “human-led” to “intelligent-driven,” significantly improving service efficiency and customer experience, and becoming the core engine for “efficiency gains.”

Since 2025, AI applications in China’s insurance industry have entered a new phase of large-scale deployment. Listed insurers have repeatedly made AI a core strategic lever and increased resource investment. According to Ping An, the group adheres to the principle of “AI in ALL.” It is customer-demand oriented, with enabling the core business as the centerpiece, and it continues investing in R&D to build leading technological capabilities based on four pillars of artificial intelligence—namely, algorithms, data, scenarios, and computing power. In 2025, more than 230k employees at Ping An used the company’s internal agent platform to develop over 70k agent applications, with 3.65 billion model calls throughout the year.

China Life also uses AI to enhance quality and efficiency. In its annual report, it mentions that it actively connects with the national “Artificial Intelligence+” action plan, comprehensively builds an AI capability system covering every link of the company’s operations and management; it also builds a data space with “an order of magnitude of data—myriad features—hundreds of dimensions of labels.”

When AI becomes “infrastructure,” what it brings is not only cost reduction, but more importantly “efficiency + quality,” penetrating the entire business process. For example, China Life said that large models enable agents to conduct professional and personalized business development, improving customer outreach efficiency, with year-over-year growth of more than 15% in annual customer visit frequency. An insurance company like ZhongAn said that AI technology has been deeply integrated into the entire chain of product design, marketing, underwriting, service, claims, and quality control. In private-domain scenarios, AI customer service helps a single seat serve more than 100k terminal users. The automation rate of health insurance claim case reviews exceeds 45%, enabling settlement within 15 seconds at the fastest, and more than 76% of customers receive claim payments within one working day. In the auto ecosystem, more than 50% of cases achieve “seconds-to-connection, seconds-to-review, seconds-to-compensation” via video; the fastest AI-assisted damage assessment time has been reduced to 116 seconds.

As Wang Peng, deputy director of research at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, analyzed, against the backdrop of fluctuations in industry labor headcount, AI can significantly enhance total-factor productivity. Through tools such as intelligent underwriting and instant claims settlement, insurers achieve second-level case closures and high levels of automation, greatly cutting operating costs and improving customer experience.

From supporting tools to a strategic engine

Looking ahead, multiple listed insurers have clearly set AI as a long-term strategic direction. At a key moment in the industry’s digital transformation, AI is no longer merely an efficiency-improving auxiliary tool; it has become the core strategic engine for driving business growth and reshaping the competitive landscape.

“AI is not a multiple-choice question; it’s a mandatory answer question,” said Guo Xiaotao, co-CEO of Ping An, at the company’s earnings briefing. He stated that Ping An is promoting the “comprehensive finance of 九九归一” (nine-to-one integration) plan, aiming to integrate more than 700 million internet-registered users into a single unified super entry point driven by AI. This will enable the comprehensive aggregation of traffic, entry points, and back-end data, allowing customers to complete a closed loop of medical, eldercare, and comprehensive financial services within a one-stop entry point.

Regarding expanding AI applications, Qin Hongbo, deputy general manager of New China Life, said that to realize “let robots do what robots should do, and let employees do what is more valuable for them to do.” With the arrival of the AI era, technology enabling has already penetrated every aspect of business and management at New China Life, becoming the core engine for the company’s high-quality development. New China Life will continue to maintain strategic resolve, investing both in people and in things. Guided by the new “14th Five-Year Plan” period’s (2026–2030) technology roadmap, it aims to make AI deliver greater effectiveness at New China Life.

At an earnings briefing, Ding Xiangqun, chairman of PICC (People’s Insurance Company of China), stated clearly that it positions the technology line as an “accelerator,” and proposed to “more proactively seize opportunities in artificial intelligence development, deepen reforms of the technology management system and digital initiatives, accelerate the release of technological productive forces, and seize the commanding heights of intelligent and digital transformation.”

Implementing strategy requires scientific methodology guidance. Fu Yifu, a special research fellow at SuShang Bank, said that when insurers build AI capabilities, they should focus on three dimensions of coordination. On the one hand, build an integrated foundation of data and computing power. The effectiveness of AI depends on data quality. Insurers need to break down internal “data silos” that have long existed, while simultaneously building hybrid-cloud and private-computing-power infrastructure that meets regulatory requirements, ensuring the intensive use of data assets under a compliance premise. On the other hand, balance efficiency improvement with risk control. The financial industry has very high requirements for accuracy and explainability; AI applications need to establish a supporting model governance system, including algorithm audits, human fallback mechanisms, and ethical standards, to prevent compliance risks arising from “black-box” operations. In addition, it is necessary to reshape organizational capabilities for human-AI collaboration. The deep penetration of technology requires redefining job responsibilities, focusing on cultivating frontline employees’ ability to collaborate with AI tools rather than simply replacing them, and achieving an upgrade in the organization’s overall cognition level through continuous skill reengineering.

Beijing Business Daily reporter Li Xiumei

(Editor: Qian Xiaorui)

Keyword: