AI tool brings real-world value to Zurich USMM underwriters
From pilot to productivity: How a Zurich Innovation Championship winner is transforming underwriting for Zurich’s U.S. Middle Market team.
In an industry known for its deliberate pace, Zurich North America’s U.S. Middle Market (USMM) team has made a swift and strategic leap — bringing a generative AI tool into the hands of underwriters in just months. And they’re using it without sacrificing the thoughtful, rigorous approach the insurance world is built on.
The AI tool, developed by insurtech startup Sixfold, emerged from the 2024 Zurich Innovation Championship (ZIC), where it won in the commercial insurance category. What started as a promising idea quickly turned into a real-world solution — one that’s now expanding across Zurich’s USMM offices after Zurich’s early USMM users reported significant benefits.
“We launched with four Zurich Middle Market offices in January 2025 and are now expanding Sixfold to dozens more offices countrywide,” said Amy Nelsen (left), Head of Underwriting Operations for U.S. Middle Market at Zurich North America.
The tool streamlines some of the more tedious, hunting-and-gathering aspects of underwriting. The result: Underwriters can gain back valuable hours to focus on higher-order analysis, customer relationships and decision-making.
From idea to impact in under a year
Sixfold’s platform uses generative AI to create full underwriting narratives in minutes, distilling thousands of pages of exposure data, loss runs and risk reports into concise, underwriter-ready summaries. During the initial rollout, 80% of submissions handled by 16 underwriters were processed with assistance from Sixfold, saving an estimated average of 60 minutes per submission.
“Sixfold streamlines the way underwriters receive information on new submissions, offering a holistic and simplified overview of a business’s operations and exposures right from the point of entry into our workflow,” Madison Chapman (left), a Senior Middle Market Underwriter, said. “It compresses information into an easy-to-read format and allows us to make necessary adjustments to the data input. We can then focus on adding our reasoning and judgment regarding the risk.”
And the time savings?
“Depending on the complexity of the account, underwriters often average 30 minutes to an hour on data collection and examination prior to the creative aspect of our role as decision-makers,” Chapman said. “Sixfold gives the majority of this time back to us, which can help improve response time to our brokers.”
Other early users see similar workload and work-life benefits.
“It quickly picks up information that would normally take me time to siphon through,” said Kay Miller (left), Senior Financial Institutions Underwriter. “Additional documents can be uploaded and then the information is reanalyzed. It’s also helpful in evaluating loss runs and spotting trends and concerns.”
Ryan Johnson (left), Senior Middle Market Underwriter, added, “Sixfold pulls information from different sources and aggregates it into one spot, which helps me set a foundation to start my narrative. The exposure and loss run summaries are extremely helpful.”
Building trust through accuracy
From day one, Sixfold and Zurich knew accuracy was non-negotiable.
“Underwriters won’t adopt a tool if they can’t trust the data,” said Alex Schmelkin, CEO of Sixfold. “So we built a really sophisticated accuracy tool that reports back to Zurich on accuracy across key metrics. That transparency has been critical.”
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Nelsen emphasized the importance of starting with a low-risk use case. “We began with using Sixfold to support development of the underwriting narrative because our underwriters already know the account. If something’s off, they would catch it. That gave us time to continue to train and improve the model before rolling it out to additional underwriters.”
More than efficiency
While the initial goal was to save time, the collaboration has evolved into something more strategic.
“What started as a productivity gain has shown the potential to help drive even better underwriting,” Schmelkin said. “We’re helping underwriters make more confident decisions in the evaluation of the risk, which can lead to better quotes and better solutions for customers.”
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Nelsen added: “We’re not trying to replace underwriters. We’re giving them a head start. Instead of reading the equivalent of 10 novels a week and writing a book report on each account, our underwriters start with a first draft — not a final answer. With the first draft report, they can spend more time applying their knowledge, experience and judgment. That helps them craft a more tailored, on-point coverage offering for the customer.”
She welcomes both enthusiasm and skepticism about the technology.
“It’s great to have underwriters on our team who are super positive, but I like hearing from people who are skeptical,” Nelsen said. “That’s where you understand concerns and issues to address: If someone is skeptical about accuracy, how do we make sure we do the right testing and let them know about the accuracy measure, for example.”
Governance is critical
Zurich’s approach is grounded in strong internal governance. The Zurich USMM team adheres to the company’s Data Commitment and AI Assurance Framework, and both Zurich and Sixfold regularly confer with regulators and ensure customer data is protected in internal, controlled environments.
“It’s important for both internal and external folks to know that we take that very seriously,” Nelsen said. “We’re still cautious and we’re deliberate. But we’re also committed to progress and empowering our teams.”
She adds: “The complexity within the Middle Market space that lands on the underwriter’s desk lends itself to a lot of opportunities for AI and other solutions to help drive enhancements. We want to enable our underwriters to be out in the market, making connections with brokers and understanding our customers — not sitting behind a desk eight hours a day. This is about giving our underwriters the tools they need to enjoy their work and to thrive in a complex, fast-moving world.”
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- Wendy Donahue