Top Agentic Faces
in Insurance

Antony Elliott

Group Head of AI R&D

Zurich Insurance

Antony Elliott is Group Head of AI R&D at Zurich Insurance Group, where he is focused on bringing AI out of the lab and into the hands of the business. A recognised driver of practical AI adoption in insurance, Antony conceived and led Zurich's Agentic AI Hyper Challenge, the largest agentic AI hackathon in the insurance industry, engaging 1,000+ participants across 40+ countries and generating 200+ prototypes, with winning solutions now moving into production. He also co-leads Zurich's start-up engagement through the Zurich Innovation Championship, using a venture clienting approach connecting the business with hundreds of AI-first start-ups and accelerating time to value. With 25 years in insurance and deep experience across transformation, architecture, and innovation, Antony collaborates with the best of academia, start-ups, internal talent, and hyperscalers to turn frontier AI into real-world impact.

Antony took on the hardest part of agentic transformation in a global insurer: mobilising the whole organisation behind it. He created Zurich's Agentic AI Hyper Challenge, the largest agentic AI hackathon in the insurance industry, drawing over 1,000 participants from 40-plus countries to build 218 working prototypes against 17 prioritised use cases across claims, underwriting, sales and finance. The deliberately mixed field of startups, enterprise tech firms, independent developers and Zurich's own engineers competed on the same real problems, with senior business sponsors owning every theme and Group Executive Committee co-sponsorship clearing the path from prototype to production. Built on a "show us, don't tell us" ethos, the programme put working agents in front of leaders rather than slideware, and all five winners are now piloted and moving into production across more than ten countries. Most importantly it is repeatable: an ExCo-sponsored, governed pathway from problem to deployed agent that reruns annually, with the 2026 edition already underway and a stronger tilt toward upskilling internal teams. Antony has built the institutional capability to do agentic AI at scale inside a 150-year-old insurer, which is exactly what the Agentic Innovator recognition is about.

Marcin Ogniewski

Corporate Business Development Director

PZU

Marcin Ogniewski is Corporate Business Development Director at PZU Group, where he has been driving business and technological innovation since 2013. Since 2020 he has overseen initiatives aimed at advancing the development of corporate insurance, and in 2022 he was appointed to the Management Board of PZU LAB SA. He has led numerous projects focused on enhancing safety standards in industrial facilities and vehicle fleets, optimising customer service processes, supporting sales activities, and driving process digitalisation. A graduate of the Military University of Technology, Marcin combines deep domain expertise with a hands-on approach to transformation.

Marcin and his team took PZU's corporate insurance division from market search to live production in roughly six months. The Corporate Client Unit at PZU handles over 106,000 broker inquiries a year in unstructured formats: email bodies, PDFs, images and Office files, all parsed manually until now. Their answer is AuroraAI, named by the employees themselves, which turns broker emails into structured, quote-ready data in minutes and feeds pricing fields straight into the policy system, so sales teams start with insights rather than inboxes. What sets the work apart is the discipline: rather than bolting AI onto legacy processes, Marcin redesigned the business process around AI first using a true agentic methodology built on autonomy, control and velocity. Property is live now, with liability and full rollout following within weeks and further product lines after that. The goal is straight-through processing as the default rather than the exception, on a foundation that gets faster with every process they add.

Javier Tiemblo Sanchidrían

COO & Chief Artificial Intelligence

Proyectos y Seguros

Javier Tiemblo Sanchidrían is Chief Operating Officer and Chief Artificial Intelligence at Proyectos y Seguros, where he bridges solid business fundamentals with the practical application of new technologies. After a distinguished tenure orchestrating financial strategy as CFO and Vice President at AMC Networks, he shifted his focus to the digital transformation of the insurance arena. A steadfast advocate for the "human + AI" paradigm as a true engine for operational agility, Javier deals in cold realities rather than hollow promises, embedding agentic AI in robust, production-ready architectures that drive tangible, long-term value creation. He holds credentials in AI strategy from MIT Sloan School of Management and IESE Business School.

Javier brings a CFO's discipline to agentic AI: every initiative has to prove its ROI, and AI is treated like a student that earns more autonomy as it learns, always with a human in the loop. As COO and Chief AI Officer of a Spanish multi-line brokerage, he has stood shoulder to shoulder with the team to move beyond theoretical pilots, bringing six live initiatives into daily operations, from call-centre quality and sales to training and governance. The implemented autonomous agent reviews call-centre calls without bias, multiplying auditing capacity fifteenfold. His voice agent Andrea, live in production, made almost 100,000 outbound calls in a single month, quadrupled lead-to-policy conversion and saved roughly 25 days of agent time, while filtering tens of thousands of no-answer calls at no cost. Each of these initiatives operates the EU AI Act auditing process, undergoing continuous review and regulatory adaptation. Javier shows what agentic AI looks like when it is owned at executive level and measured like any other investment: holistic, in production, and accountable.

Ed Leon Klinger

CEO

Flock

Ed Leon Klinger is co-founder and CEO of Flock, an AI-powered insurance provider for commercial motor fleets, and a member of the leadership team at Admiral Pioneer, the venture and commercial insurance arm of The Admiral Group. Under his leadership, Flock has built telematics-powered insurance that reduces crash frequency by over 10% year-on-year, with hundreds of commercial fleets trusting the platform to keep their drivers safe and their vehicles on the road. Flock works with global brokers including Aon and Marsh, and is backed by investors such as Octopus, Social Capital, and Anthemis. In May 2026, Flock was acquired by Admiral Group for £80 million.

Ed and the Flock team have reimagined what an insurer can be. Flock's mission is to make the world quantifiably safer, and under Ed's leadership that mission now runs on agentic AI. Flock is launching Jay, the first AI assistant in the world to sit over live driving and claims data, giving every fleet manager an on-demand safety expert. Behind the scenes, Jay has access to nearly one billion miles of telemetry data, enabling it to deliver real-time safety and claims insights tailored to every fleet and every driver. The result is a safety flywheel: fewer crashes, sharper pricing, faster support, and measurable outcomes. Flock has not just adopted AI, they have laid the groundwork for an entirely new agentic insurance business, recently recognised through Flock's £80 million acquisition by the Admiral Group.

Pieter Viljoen

Chief Data and AI Officer

Allianz Partners

Pieter Viljoen is Chief Data and AI Officer at Allianz Partners, where he leads the data and artificial intelligence strategy for one of the world's largest protection and care insurers. With around €10 billion in annual revenues and roughly 90 million cases handled each year, Allianz Partners operates at a scale where technology decisions carry immediate business impact. Pieter has driven the transition from conventional automation to agentic AI, taking the organisation straight from concept to global production without the typical proof-of-concept detour. His approach centres on three principles: autonomy, control, and velocity, treating them as operational levers rather than abstract aspirations.

Pieter made a deliberate decision to skip proofs of concept entirely. In his view, agentic AI is a platform capability you scale from day one, not a patchwork fix you validate for months. He took Allianz Partners straight to production on two high-impact use cases, claims automation and invoice automation, both live within 2.5 months in highly regulated UK and DACH markets, then scaled globally. In claims, autonomous agents review the case, validate coverage, settle, respond to the customer, and trigger payment near-instantly; only a small fraction of complex cases escalate for single-touch human review. In invoicing, the same architecture processes millions of invoices from a 16,500-strong partner network. Average claim handling time fell from 29 days to 3.5 days, with a significant volume now completing touchlessly in minutes. The playbook now delivers around 60% straight-through processing, 99.7% decision accuracy that's policy-traced end-to-end, and is live across 15 countries and 5 insurance lines. Pieter built for scale using standardised, reusable components and paired this with early investment in compliance, bringing in third-party legal experts so that regulatory assurance accelerated deployment rather than slowing it down.