The new levers of insurance productivity

A PwC Canada and Roots perspective on the future of insurance productivity

For decades, disciplined underwriting, prudent regulation, and deep institutional trust have set Canadian insurers apart. These strengths still matter. But they’re no longer enough.

Around the world, leading insurers are redefining what productivity means. It’s no longer about how much work your people can do. It’s about how much work your systems can do for them through automation, connected data, and AI-embedded workflows. Underwriting and claims are being redesigned and scaled beyond what legacy processes permit. The insurers pulling ahead aren’t just working harder. They’re working differently.

Canadian insurers face the same imperative. As consolidation reshapes the Canadian property and casualty (P&C) market, the carriers that act fastest—rethinking how work flows, how decisions get made, and how technology supports talent—will define the next era of competitive advantage.

This article explores where that productivity opportunity lies and how to capture it.

The pressure on Canadian P&C insurers

Canadian insurers are facing pressure from multiple directions at once. Claims costs are climbing as inflation, supply-chain disruptions, and severe weather strain loss ratios. Talent shortages in underwriting, claims, and analytics are constraining capacity just as complexity and volume increase. And a softening global market means pricing pressure is expected to continue through 2026 and 2027.

At the same time, expectations are rising. Broker consolidation is accelerating demand for faster, clearer underwriting decisions. Commercial clients expect greater transparency, responsiveness, and precision. Personal lines policyholders compare their insurance experience to digital leaders in banking and retail—and demand the same intuitive self-service and real-time updates.

Traditional workflows can’t keep pace. Too many insurers still rely on manual intake, document-heavy processes, fragmented architectures, and siloed data that can’t support real-time decisions.

Together, these forces underscore a hard reality: Canadian insurers must reduce operational friction and speed up decision making if they want to protect profitability and stay competitive.

Productivity has become both the defining constraint and the defining opportunity.

Redefining productivity for digital insurance operations

Traditional definitions of productivity centred on labour ratios, processing speed, and cost efficiency. Modern insurance productivity is different. Today, productivity is measured by flow:

How quickly a submission moves from receipt to decision
How seamlessly claims data transforms into insights
How effectively routine tasks can be automated
How consistently decisions reflect analytics and rules
How reliably information supports underwriting and claims judgment

This is digital throughput: the ability to convert data into decisions with minimal interventions.

Underwriting complex risks still demands strong relationships, deep industry expertise, and consistent service across new business, renewals, and claims. But without sufficient digital throughput, insurers are pulled back into manual administration—searching for information, extracting data from documents, routing emails, and reconciling mismatches. Bottlenecks end up dictating the customer and broker experience.

When productivity is redesigned around digital throughput, the shift is fundamental. Submissions classify and score themselves. Claims triage automatically based on severity. Documents become structured data instantly. AI agents direct work to the right person at the right moment. Decisions happen continuously, not in batches.

Productivity moves from a measure of efficiency to the foundation for growth, accuracy, talent retention, and market competitiveness.

Four productivity levers for Canadian insurance operational efficiency

Productivity affects every part of the insurance value chain, but four areas represent the greatest opportunity—and the greatest urgency—for Canadian carriers. Think of these four areas as a framework for where to concentrate your transformation efforts. Through our collaboration with Roots, an AI company that helps insurers improve their end-to-end operational efficiency, we’ve seen what’s possible when these levers are applied.

Underwriting is the heartbeat of growth. But many Canadian carriers still rely on manual intake and data assembly. The opportunity lies in automated submission extraction, appetite matching and risk classification, intelligent triage and routing, and data enrichment from internal and external sources. Together, these capabilities accelerate decisions while improving risk selection, pricing quality, and broker confidence.

In practice: We’ve seen a multi-line P&C holding company automate underwriting across multiple lines of business, reducing submission setup and clearance time by 80%, improving loss ratios by up to 3%, and increasing quote-to-bind ratios. The initiative also eliminated manual data entry and freed underwriter capacity for judgment-driven risk assessment.

Claims excellence increasingly depends on intelligence, not just effort. Leading insurers are applying AI to interpret, prioritize, and route work at scale. The capabilities underpinning this shift include AI-driven first notice of loss interpretation, severity scoring, automated assignment, document intelligence, and fraud detection.

In practice: We’ve seen a national commercial carrier process more than 3,000 claims items each day through automated indexing, achieving a 98.5% straight-through processing rate. Loss run reports are processed up to 90% faster, reducing quote cycle times. The shift moves adjusters from administrative load to judgment-intensive work, improving outcomes for customers and carriers alike.

Operational drag acts as a hidden tax within many insurers. Activities such as email routing, document handling, reconciliation, and endorsement servicing consume time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere. AI agents can handle these discrete activities, improving cycle times and reducing expense ratios.

In practice: We’ve seen a top-five US P&C carrier transform its commercial lines operations by automating more than 500,000 email-driven endorsement requests, achieving an 87% straight-through processing rate.

Productivity can’t scale without data that moves. Cloud platforms, API-driven integration, unified data fabrics, and real-time analytics form the foundation for AI-enabled operations.

In practice: In our work with insurers, organizations investing in connected architectures are replacing fragmented, point-to-point integrations with unified data layers that support AI-enabled workflows across underwriting, claims, and servicing—creating a shared source of truth and enabling automation to scale safely. This matters in Canada, where many insurers are mid-transformation, modernizing core systems, moving workloads to cloud, and redesigning the customer experience simultaneously. The opportunity is to begin productivity transformation now, not wait until after modernization is complete.

These four levers, when combined, create a step-change in performance. Insurers that act now will be better positioned to turn productivity gains into competitive advantage through sharper underwriting, faster claims resolution, and stronger broker and customer relationships.

The question is: how do you move fast enough?

From framework to action: building a digital-first insurance operation

The levers are clear. The challenge is activating them while the business continues to run.

Traditional transformation programs often require multi-year timelines and sequential delivery. That approach can’t keep pace with the speed at which the market is evolving. Modernization must happen while the business continues to operate and scale. It must be faster, smoother, and more iterative.

This is where the right combination of capabilities makes a difference. The insurers making real progress are bringing together:

Strategic clarity
Operating model redesign
AI and agent-based solutions
Modern architecture and cloud foundations
Change management and talent evolution
Regulatory and risk alignment

No single vendor or internal team can do all of this well. The insurers gaining ground are combining automation technology with the strategic and industry insight needed to redesign operating models, navigate regulatory expectations, and bring their people along—all while embedding responsible AI governance from the start.

The path forward for Canadian P&C insurers

Every insurer will take its own path toward digital productivity. But the pattern among global leaders is consistent. Progress starts with understanding how handoffs, bottlenecks, delays, and data gaps shape cycle times. From there, insurers can focus on the workflows where automation has a disproportionate impact—and deploy AI directly into live operations as part of the operating model, not as disconnected pilots. What works is scaled. Roles and decision pathways evolve. Productivity becomes visible, and gains are reinvested into higher-value outcomes.

This progression is iterative. It requires a leadership mindset that treats productivity as a strategic asset, not a cost initiative. Leaders driving the next era of Canadian insurance are:

Shifting from capacity-dependent models to human teams and AI delivering outcomes together
Championing faster decision making and experimentation
Aligning metrics and incentives around digital outcomes
Building new roles focused on automation, AI governance, and workflow design
Closing the gap between operational expertise and digital ambition

Insurers that accelerate productivity today will operate fundamentally differently from their peers over the next three to five years. They can:

Deliver underwriting and claims decisions in minutes, not days
Operate on real-time insights rather than retrospective reporting
Reduce leakage through intelligent triage and decision support
Improve broker confidence and conversion through speed and consistency
Support employee well-being by eliminating low-value work
Achieve lower expense ratios without sacrificing quality
Bring new products to market faster through modern, connected architectures

The global insurance market is shifting toward models built on agility, intelligence, and continuous digital flow. Productivity is the defining strategic priority for the next decade—it unlocks capacity, sharpens judgment, strengthens customer trust, and accelerates growth. The tools exist. The opportunity is here.

Insurers that follow this path will compete more effectively and set a new standard for operational excellence in the Canadian market.

How PwC Canada and Roots can help

Productivity gains come from re-engineering how work flows across the value chain—not from isolated technology deployments. That’s the foundation of our collaboration with Roots.

At PwC Canada, we bring global insurance insights, operating model guidance, and a change management approach designed to help teams adopt new ways of working. We help insurers align modernization efforts to executive priorities, navigate regulatory expectations, and embed responsible-AI governance tailored to the Canadian market.

Roots deploys AI agents across underwriting, claims, and servicing—automating intake, routing, document understanding, and first-level decisioning. These implementations show that intelligent automation can be adopted quickly, safely, and at scale when embedded inside real workflows.

Together, we offer a unified path to digital productivity: strategy, technology, and organizational change—designed for Canadian carriers ready to move.

The new productivity levers propelling Canadian insurers