GoKawiilThe insurance industry is undergoing a major shift as businesses look to quickly adopt artificial intelligence (AI) while seeking insurance policies to manage potential risks — especially those posed by agentic AI systems that could cause significant damage before being caught by human-in-the-loop processes.
The current risk is small as companies test potential ways to integrate AI into their operations. But some insurers are already taking steps to exclude AI-caused damage from their more traditional insurance policies, leaving the risk to be absorbed by cyber insurance policies or tech errors-and-omissions (E&O) coverage. Others have already created explicit policies to protect against AI risks, even if the current market for insuring against AI risk is tiny.
Insurance companies — and their clients — need to focus on the problem because AI is quickly becoming ingrained as part of operations, both by businesses and cyberattackers, says Maria Long, chief underwriting officer at Resilience, a cyber resilience and insurance provider. Resilience, for example, has seen an increase in the frequency of cyber-insurance claims by its policyholders in 2025 — an increase the company attributes, in part, to attackers' use of AI to improve phishing lures and speed up their operations.
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As a result, the company is shifting toward a strategy that separates the risks from AI and traditional computers to better create appropriate coverage.
"Our current policies inherently cover AI exposure since they do not distinguish the manner of attack but rather the outcome, like business interruption, fraud, and data breach," she says. "But we also know that AI is evolving rapidly, and lumping AI-related issues with traditional cyber claims won't always work."
The concerns come as enterprises have accelerated their AI adoption. Sixty percent of workers now have access to sanctioned AI applications, up from 40% at the beginning of 2025, according to consultancy Deloitte's 2026 "State of AI in the Enterprise" survey of 3,200 businesses. OpenAI sees an even greater uptake of AI usage, with 75% of workers reporting that they have seen productivity gains with AI, saving nearly an hour a week. Token usage is also 320 times higher than a year ago, OpenAI stated in its "State of Enterprise AI" report published in December 2025.
Security and governance, however, have not kept pace. While most companies (74%) plan to deploy agentic AI, only 21% have developed a mature AI governance model, Deloitte stated.
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