Zurich scales Agentic AI to 5 countries in 90 days, proving the target model for its global rollout

 Zurich is scaling AI-powered risk digitization across 20+ markets within the first 16months, reducing manual processing time by over 80% and building a repeatable deployment model for global expansion.

"Cytora united cutting-edge techand a winning team to deliver collaborative, high-quality results atunprecedented speed."

Armin Schaefer, Head of Customer & Digital IT, Commercial Insurance and ProjectDirector

The Partnership at a Glance

· Client: Zurich Commercial Insurance

· Program: Z-Horizon+

· The Goal:Accelerate the journey to decision-ready risks across 20+ global markets with an 80% reduction in manual submission processing time.

· The Velocity: Zurich’s deployment model overlayed three-month delivery cycles of batches of countries& lines of business, enabling monthly go-live drops. In the first year of partnership 20+ countries will be deployed.

The Challenge: Unlocking Global Scaling

Zurich’s underwriters were overwhelmed with the number of submissions they were receiving daily. Each underwriter was manually reading, reviewing and interpreting every single risk that they received, resulting in a capacity to focus on only a fraction of the submissions received, and no consistent way of prioritising them.

In addition, Zurich knows that in mid-market especially, speed wins. Zurich had a desire to reduce time to underwriter decision by 80%, down to 15 minutes, by automating decision ready risks and enabling underwriters to see and process greater volumes of business.

Evaluating risk submissions against Zurich’s strategy and appetite required manual intervention absorbing scarce underwriting capacity. The fundamental challenge lay in the heterogeneous nature of incoming risk submissions and the need to for them to conform to Zurich's own view of risk while accommodating local differences. Underwriters were forced to interact with multiple systems, slowing down critical decision‑making. Zurich set out to establish a single headless intelligence layer that could seamlessly integrate with their core platforms.

Importantly, through their workbench (Z‑Horizon+, a configured version ofMicrosoft Dynamics 365), Zurich had already established a globally standardized platform where underwriters act upon risks consistently across markets. The challenge was not where decisions happened, but how to ensure that all the required insights were readily available and could flow seamlessly into Z-Horizon+,to support quick decision making by the Underwriter.

The prerequisite to this is achieving scalable digitization that can flex across many different countries, languages and lines of business. This requires a platform that can transform ‘submissions’ into ‘decision-ready risks’ across multiple countries in parallel, without the traditional months-long rollout for every new territory or line of business.

As such, Zurich sought an Agentic AI core solution for risk digitization to support their global mid-market growth by increasing the volume of processed risks, delivering faster risk insights to underwriters, and enabling end-to-end, frictionless risk flows with standardized operations in over 20+ markets and 10+ Lines of Business.

The Solution: A Roadmap Built for Speed

The approach to risk digitization was grounded in a clear growth objective: unlocking a scalable operating model in mid‑market that turned submissions into decision-ready risks, enabling underwriters to act on higher volumes and with faster turnaround times.

To realise this vision, Zurich selected Cytora due to its advanced configurability, relevant market expertise and mature headless platform offering. Cytora presented a multi-language, unstructured data solution that could be scaled fast while allowing Zurich to transition to self-serve platform management. This enabled Zurich both rapid deployment and control to define their view of risk globally but also with local market flexibility where needed.

Zurich now operates a fully integrated, end‑to‑end submission processing model, with Cytora serving as the upstream, headless intelligence layer, converting unstructured and multi-language submissions into structured, decision-ready risks aligned withZurich’s global underwriting standards. Z-Horizon+ operates as the downstream system of execution, where underwriters consistently assess, quote, and bind risks (or pass to specialist underwriting platforms) across markets. Crucially, outputs are delivered in local languages out‑of‑the‑box, enabling Zurich’s business units to operate with native‑language insight in a globally deployed tool - supporting faster, more confident decision‑making by the Underwriter without the need for local custom builds.

As a result, Zurich eliminated re-keying, re-formatting or system switching. Just complete, decision-ready risks delivered directly into the underwriting workflow to the Underwriter.

"The platform has an incredible workflow that will have many benefits, such as providing more customer information and a deeper analysis for decision-making in the UW area"  

Senior UW - Property, Zurich Mexico

The Rollout strategy

Zurich’s rollout moved fast and kept accelerating as the model scaled.

Foundation (Late 2025): Proven at scale across seven countries and two major lines of business, processing complex, multi-language submissions with 95%+ accuracy.

Acceleration (Q1 2026): A modular delivery model and master schema compressed release cycles, expanded into four new countries, added four lines of business, and materially reduced triage times.

Global Expansion (Q2 2026): Zurich is shifting to a self‑serve deployment model, upskilling its teams to remove vendor dependencies and launch new markets in just twelve weeks cycles - with a clear path towards 15-minute triage time.

A key enabler of this rollout velocity has been the engagement of local underwriters, driven by trust in the solution and its impact.

"We're now at 11 (countries), and then we go to 22 by the end of the year. The technology converts unstructured submission documents into "decision-ready" risks, the companies said, with manual triage time falling from 75 minutes to 15 minutes."

John Martin - Application Portfolio Manager, Zurich

Scaling via the multi-lingual Intake Master Schema

Zurich’s deployment speed is powered by one principle: build once and reuse. Because all Lines of Business share a subset of common data elements, these shared fields form the foundation of the Cytora Intake Master Schema. Requirements for these core fields have been harmonized globally, ensuring that foundational configuration is done once and reused across all deployments.

The result is speed without compromise. Zurich can launch new markets and products with minimal setup while adapting to local requirements - delivering consistent, accurate, decision-ready output every time.

The impact: measurable results delivered at pace

By prioritizing deployment speed, Zurich unlocked immediate gains in operational throughput. By redesigning how risks are digitised and triaged globally, Zurich has delivered measurable gains in speed, quality and scalability.

Cytora hasn’t just improved efficiency- it has created a scalable, future-ready operating model powering Zurich’s mid-market growth at speed.

‍