Speaking at a media briefing held during the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous, SCOR’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Thierry Léger, and the Chief Executive Officer of SCOR Global P&C, Jean-Paul Conoscente, set out the reinsurer’s view on the forces reshaping the industry, with artificial intelligence (AI) emerging as one of the most significant themes of the discussion.
Léger stated that SCOR sees AI as central to its future, both as a tool and as a source of risk. “At SCOR, we are totally leaning into AI. We think that AI for a data-driven company, a company full of experts, AI is an incredible opportunity to become better and more efficient at what we do already,” he said. He was equally clear, however, that the technology cuts both ways: “AI, however, obviously is also a threat for all cyber attacks.”
For Léger, governance is the area of greatest concern. “Personally, I see one of the biggest challenges in AI coming from governance,” he said, pointing to the emergence of “agentic AI-driven people, if you want virtual employees,” that are beginning to support underwriting decisions and may, in time, make them independently.
He acknowledged the shift will not be straightforward for an industry built on a century of human judgement. Despite this, he struck a broadly optimistic note: “Again, we are not worried. For us, we clearly think it’s a net opportunity, but it’s clear that we go into this eyes wide open, and we really get the opportunities, but also drive or have an eye on the risks that come with it.”
Léger pointed to data showing a sharp rise in AI-related litigation between 2022 and 2026, presently numbering in the hundreds of cases but, in his view, set to grow rapidly: “This is just the beginning of this AI litigation.” He noted that cover for this exposure currently sits across multiple lines, including cyber and directors’ and officers’ insurance, and that “the future will show which covers we respond for which type of covers.”
He also set out the scale of the opportunity that AI represents for the industry. “In cyber, the gap is much bigger, so we still believe maybe 5-10% of the non-physical world is actually insured,” he said. “So, the gap is probably 80 to 95%. Nobody knows exactly, but the gap is already very big.”
He linked this directly to the pace of technological change: “It’s very difficult to follow, and when the reviewers, experts find it difficult to follow, usually there is actually a difficulty to cover for this type of risk. At the same time, it’s a huge opportunity, of course. The whole non-physical world, the whole virtual world.”
On the underwriting side, Léger confirmed that SCOR is already putting the technology to use. “At SCOR we use AI to power our underwriting,” he said, citing an AI-driven terrorism underwriting tool that is close to going live. He was keen to stress that this comes with internal safeguards: “We set the limits and framework as we would do with any of our employees.” He added that the efficiency gains involved would help SCOR compete from its position as a relatively small player with a large franchise: “This type of development, AI augmented underwriting will help us to actually scale.”
Conoscente confirmed that AI would also be applied to property catastrophe underwriting, telling the briefing that SCOR intends to begin deploying it from 2027 “and trying to optimise our capital deployment across the different geographies.”
More broadly, he framed AI as one of several levers behind the reinsurer’s growth strategy, alongside disciplined capital allocation: “We’ll continue to deploy capital dynamically through the cycle, trying to deploy capital more in lines of business that we see with good rate accuracy and retrenching from the lines of business that are more challenged, using AI, data, and technology to help us scale.”
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