For years, insurers have discussed AI as an aspiration—confined to pilots, point solutions, and incremental automation. But inside HDFC ERGO General Insurance, AI is no longer a future roadmap item. It is being embedded directly into the company’s operating fabric—reshaping how risk is underwritten, claims are settled, cyber threats are managed, and insurance is delivered in real time.
This shift is not being driven as a standalone technology program, but as a business-led re-architecture of the insurer’s digital core. From AI-augmented underwriting and zero-touch claims to cloud-native, API-driven platforms and event-based insurance models, HDFC ERGO is using technology to hard-wire speed, intelligence, and trust into day-to-day operations, states Sriram Naganathan, President & Chief Technology Officer, HDFC ERGO General Insurance
Some edited excerpts:
AI-led underwriting is becoming mainstream in insurance. How is HDFC ERGO leveraging AI/ML to move from traditional rule-based underwriting to behavioral, dynamic, and personalised risk scoring?
AI-led underwriting is transforming the insurance landscape, and at HDFC ERGO General Insurance, we are at the forefront of this evolution. There is a significant shift towards the use of AI and generative AI to transform underwriting operations.
AI adoption is driven by the need for efficiency, accuracy, and data-driven decision-making in a rapidly evolving insurance landscape. By integrating advanced analytics into underwriting and streamlining claims workflows, we have significantly improved straight-through processing (STP) rates—now achieving ~65% in health insurance and ~98% in motor insurance. This end-to-end digital approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also empowers teams to serve customers with complex requirements.
Our underwriting ecosystem is now deeply augmented with AI and ML models that draw insights from a diverse range of data sources, including proposal inputs, risk inspection reports, historical claims, geospatial intelligence, vehicle and health parameters, and external data signals. These models continually learn and recalibrate risk, enabling us to deliver personalised pricing and coverage recommendations instead of relying on one-size-fits-all solutions. The analytical models we have deployed are part of a closed loop feedback system which also helps finetune underwriting rules enabling higher straight through processing.
It is important to note that human expertise remains central to the process—underwriters stay in the loop for intricate or high-impact cases, ensuring transparency, governability, and responsible decision-making. GenAI and the high Cloud compute available today has helped us move from a reactive to proactive decisioning framework with real time nudges augmenting Underwriting intelligence. The third party ecosystem has also evolved considerably augmenting available data sets with additional risk elements and proxies to offer tailored personalised solutions.
The industry is moving toward zero-touch claims. What are the biggest breakthroughs HDFC ERGO has made in AI-driven claims automation – estimation, fraud detection, documentation?
Zero-touch claims have been a major focus area for HDFC ERGO, particularly in motor and health insurance. We have deployed AI-driven image analytics for vehicle damage assessment, automated cost estimation, and straight-through processing for eligible claims. This has significantly reduced turnaround times while improving customer experience.
Similarly, for our health insurance portfolio, we leverage AI to analyze itemised bills, discharge summaries, and prescriptions to identify anomalies and streamline adjudication. This automation accelerates claim approvals while ensuring accurate validation of both medical and nonmedical expenses, ultimately benefiting policyholders and healthcare providers alike.
We have also started deploying GenAI powered agents which digitise, segregate and analyse third party legal claims to provide actional able nudges and short summaries to our officers who adjudicate large claims.
Similarly, in fraud detection, our machine learning models proactively flag anomalous patterns. —across claims frequency, provider behaviour, documentation inconsistencies, and historical data—allowing early intervention rather than post-facto audits.
As insurers become more digital, cybersecurity risks multiply. What are your key priorities for cyber resilience—Zero Trust, SOC modernisation, AI-enabled threat detection?
Strengthening cyber resilience is one of our highest priorities. We are taking a multilayered approach built on Zero Trust principles, where every user, device, application, and data flow is continuously verified rather than implicitly trusted. To this extent we have deployed a modern state of art detection and protection solution which protects our digital assets at both the edge and end user compute level. At the same time, we are modernising our Security Operations Centre (SOC) with advanced telemetry, automated playbooks, and real time threat intelligence to reduce detection and response times.
We recognise that cyber resilience is not the job of one department; it requires shared accountability across technology, risk, operations, partners, and every employee who interacts with data. Alongside this, we follow rigorous governance practices, multilayer encryption, and continuous vulnerability assessments to safeguard customer data and uphold trust in an increasingly digital insurance ecosystem.
If a company is transparent about data collection and its usage, follows strict cyber security regime and commits to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, it becomes feasible to strike a balance between technology and customers’ trust.
How is HDFC ERGO preparing for a world where insurance becomes a real-time, embedded, event-driven service—from travel to mobility to health?
While insurance is often associated with fear or unfortunate events, we believe the industry must evolve to become a proactive partner in people’s lives. To enable this shift, we have built robust API driven platforms delivered through Cloud based gateways that seamlessly integrate with partners across travel, mobility, healthcare, and digital ecosystems. Our systems now support real time underwriting, instant policy issuance, and rapid claims fulfilment, ensuring that protection is delivered exactly at the point of need—whether it’s a flight delay, a mobility event, or a health intervention. As product constructs continue to evolve to micro level offerings, embedded covers and benefits, it has become imperative to embrace event driven architectures.
We have also launched the Here App, a unique digital ecosystem that goes beyond traditional insurance by supporting customers across health, wellness, mobility, pets, and cyber. Powered by AI and GenAI-driven personalisation, Here enables hyperpersonalised, proactive engagement, allowing us to address real customer issues even before a claim arises. Our focus is to make insurance frictionless, contextual, and seamlessly embedded into everyday life.
Many insurers are exploring GenAI for efficiency. Where do you see real enterprise value—developer productivity, customer experience, call-centre transformation, and knowledge automation?
GenAI is rapidly gaining prominence due to its ability to process massive datasets and produce outputs across text, images, audio, and video with exceptional speed and accuracy. Most importantly, GenAI is helping businesses build deeper, holistic relationships with customers—relationships that extend beyond transactions, sales, and traditional product boundaries. It is now well established that GenAI can deliver significant improvements in operational efficiency through intelligent automation, and we have begun deploying GenAI models across multiple servicing use cases. This allows us to automate routine interactions and reallocate valuable human resources to complex cases that require expertise, judgment, and supervision.
Real value realisation through GenAI in our view happens when we look at a holistic pan enterprise perspective and through multiple lenses of operational efficiency, prevention of leakages / frauds, enabling growth and superior customer experiences. We have started realising value in the customer experience and contact centre space apart from build life cycle, but believe Claims and Underwiring are significant areas where Agentic will have considerable overall impact.
By analysing vast datasets in near real time, GenAI can enable highly personalised insurance plans, enhance fraud detection, and elevate underwriting quality through deeper pattern recognition. GenAI powered voice bots, chatbots, and virtual assistants further expand automation in customer interactions—enabling instant, 24×7 service delivery and transforming the overall engagement experience.
Many of our customer services are now accessible on popular platforms like WhatsApp through AI-driven bots, and our contact centre is largely powered by advanced AI voice agents..
Is HDFC ERGO experimenting with Agentic AI for workflow automation across underwriting and claims? What early learnings can you share?
Yes, we are actively experimenting with Agentic AI concepts to orchestrate complex workflows across underwriting and claims which can autonomously trigger tasks, route cases, fetch data, and recommend actions while operating within defined guardrails. Our approach to Agentic is use on complex processes where agents perform a set of tasks while flagging workflow to an expert in the loop for complex assessments based on flagged suggestions.
We strongly believe that Agentic AI works best when augmenting decision-making rather than replacing it. The focus should be not on replacing humans but on reducing cycle times, improving consistency, and freeing up human expertise for high-value judgment-led work.
What is your roadmap for the next 24 months—what technologies will shape HDFC ERGO’s digital core?
We will continue investing in advanced analytics, automation, and real-time capabilities while modernising our core platforms to be more agile and scalable. The overarching objective is to build a digital core that is resilient, intelligent, and customer-centric, enabling HDFC ERGO to lead in speed, trust, and innovation in the Indian insurance market.
We anticipate that our investments in building digital platforms that scale powered by the Cloud and GenAI will stand in good stead to shape our digital core.