WR Berkley Corporation CEO Rob Berkley said that the company has achieved more than 20% efficiency improvement in underwriting through artificial intelligence, and its efforts are mainly focused on the underwriting workbench and the digitization of the process from receipt to quotation.
Speaking on WR Berkley Corporation’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call, Berkley said he sees AI as having great advantages in further improving underwriting operations, adding that he has reason to believe “a lot of additional energy can be squeezed out of it.”
He also highlighted the potential for AI to improve claims operations, explaining that the company is using AI and other technologies to move to straight-through processing where appropriate.
“Ultimately, if you look at our claims profile, about 50% of our claims settle for $5,000 or less. There are many examples of situations where we show up with a sledgehammer when what we really need is a fly swatter. Using some of these techniques in the appropriate circumstances, we are able to provide better solutions to claimants in a more timely manner,” Berkley said.
He added, “There will be more progress on both fronts. We are making good progress and as an organization we are very excited about our ability to reallocate people’s time in other directions and leverage technology to drive these improvements.”
Berkley emphasized that he hopes the company can reap returns on its investments in AI while recognizing its strengths and limitations.
He noted, “We’re certainly not going to go out and try to create our own large language model. For our purposes, we’re trying to recreate something like Anthropic or OpenAI or whoever and spend tens of billions of dollars, and that’s not our strength. Our strength is leveraging existing tools and then building our own approach on top of that. Our strength is using our 60 different labs, each of which is our business, trying to use the tools and then combining the best solutions and leveraging those solutions.”
