The news: Travelers insurance company launched its AI Claim Assistant, an agentic voice service built in partnership with OpenAI. It will handle customer claim calls, beginning with auto damage filings, making it an early use case for customer-facing genAI in insurance.

How it works: AI Claim Assistant is built to walk customers through coverage details, respond to common questions, and guide them through the decision to file. From there, it directs policyholders to the app to complete next steps: submitting damage photos, initiating an appraisal, booking repairs, and renting a car.

Zoom out: Travelers has been investing heavily in technology. In Q4 2025 earnings, it teased investments in AI and analytics capabilities to price policies more effectively and expedite underwriting and claims. The company said dozens of genAI tools were already in production, and more than 20,000 out of 33,000 employees use AI tools regularly. It added that a partnership with Anthropic will assist 10,000 analysts and employees in engineering and data science.

Implications for insurers: Enterprise-wide AI is well equipped to process new data and make old data useful. But legacy technology limits the pace of change. The insurance industry’s initial adoption of AI at scale was promising, but scaling has been slow. Most insurers struggle with data fragmented across underwriting, claims, billing, and distribution as well as with systems that don't integrate well with external sources.

The data that insurers have is a competitive advantage. Indeed, Travelers says it has “decades of high-quality data from millions of transactions and interactions.” But much of that data is unstructured. Insurers' systems from a bygone technology era compare poorly to AI-native insurtechs who use their data more effectively and efficiently. But as insurers with the biggest budgets invest heavily in modernization, they may yet keep their advantage, which today is based mostly on scale and distribution.