Suncorp is banking on investments in artificial intelligence and a multi-year core systems overhaul to make insurance more accessible, including for Australians and New Zealanders who have already been priced out of coverage – even as extreme weather drove the insurer’s first-half net profit after tax down to $263 million.
Speaking at the company’s half-year results briefing earlier this week, CEO and managing director Steve Johnston said between 2% and 4% of the population across Australia and New Zealand “can’t obtain affordable insurance.” He added that the broader insurance industry was in discussion with the federal government on “how we might find an industry-wide solution for that problem.”
Johnston acknowledged the tension between current pricing pressures and household cost-of-living strains but said ongoing technology investments were central to the insurer’s response.
“Over time, with the things we’re doing with AI and Digital Insurer, we need to get better at designing new policies, new premiums, [and] new products for that subset of consumers who are really challenged to continue with their insurance,” he said.
Digital Insurer is the internal codename for Suncorp’s multi-year core platform transformation. The company is progressively implementing Duck Creek – a cloud-native, software-as-a-service policy administration system – to replace what Duck Creek Technologies described in December 2024 as “multiple on-premises legacy systems.”
Duck Creek is already live for new home and motor customers under the AA Insurance brand in New Zealand, and Johnston said results there were encouraging.
“The system has started to deliver more simplified underwriting and greater automation, and we remain confident the expected benefits that are baked into the AAI business plan but also into the whole Digital Insurer business plan will be realised over time,” he said.
The second Duck Creek release is now under way for AAMI, Suncorp’s flagship Australian consumer brand.
“We’re now well into the delivery of our second release [of Duck Creek] in our AAMI brand, which is of course our flagship national [Australian] consumer brand. We’re targeting this release for AAMI home and motor new business around the middle of this year, and migration of existing policies at renewal, which will follow soon thereafter,” Johnston added.
Suncorp indicated it will also draw on the native AI capabilities embedded within its broader core system partners, including Duck Creek, Oracle, Earnix, Genesys, Adobe, and Salesforce.
Suncorp’s push into agentic AI builds on a series of demonstrated results from prior deployments. By the end of FY25, the company’s conversational AI platform had handled more than 2.8 million digital customer interactions – a 22% increase on the previous financial year – and digital sales and service transactions for mass brands accounted for 78% of total sales, according to the company’s FY25 results.
A centrepiece of Suncorp’s AI stack is SunGPT, an internal platform built on Databricks that connects the company’s customer and operational data with large language models in what the company describes as “a safe and secure manner,” according to reporting by iTnews.
One application running on SunGPT is Single View of Claim, a generative AI tool that consolidates communications, building documents, and case notes into a unified claims summary and recommends next steps for resolution. The tool – accessible to about 1,500 claims staff – reduces per‑claim review time by between five and 30 minutes, depending on complexity.
The platform’s capabilities were recognised with the Financial Review AI Award 2025 for Ethics and Responsibility for the Single View of Claim application, according to Microsoft’s published customer case studies.
A second tool, Smart Knowledge, draws on Azure OpenAI to surface relevant underwriting guidelines and procedures for contact centre staff in real time, removing the need to navigate multiple systems during customer calls.
“As a manufacturer of insurance, we see material opportunities for AI to improve product design in a hyper-personalised insurance future and to transform claims processes from a customer perspective, all along reducing our loss and expense ratios, and importantly addressing insurance affordability,” Johnston said.
“As a distributor, we see opportunities for AI to both strengthen the effectiveness and deepen the customer engagement across our market-leading brand portfolio. This will equally apply to consumer and commercial, or as premium pools move between those portfolios over time.”
