Young insurance professionals prize technical skills, but executives say leadership will set them apart

Young insurance professionals rank technical and digital skills as the most important in their careers, but panellists at the Singapore International Reinsurance Conference (SIRC) said on Thursday (5 November) that leadership and adaptability will count for more as AI takes over routine analysis.

Under-35 attendees surveyed at SIRC ranked technical and digital skills first, commercial skills second, and leadership and adaptability last, said Lewis Garrad, partner and Asia workforce and rewards practice leader at Mercer on the last day of the conference. More than a third, however, put leadership and adaptability first.

“I would question that ordering,” Garrad said.

Diligence, speed and accuracy on routine tasks, the qualities that make early-career staff valuable today, are what AI does well, he said. “The question is, how do you go about bringing together the right combination of these capabilities, particularly as technology changes the way that we work?”

But technical ability is expected to become “more of a baseline than a differentiating factor”, said Julia Ho, APMEA business manager at Lloyd’s.

Staff will still need enough depth to know when an answer “doesn’t seem quite right”, she added. “A lot of the value, especially for an early career, comes from producing the analysis. But when a lot of that load is taken over with machines, I think it becomes maybe more of a question… about how we interrogate the analysis and bring the human judgement into the equation.”

Race to the top quickens

AI is accelerating the pace at which young insurance professionals acquire technical expertise, said Bobby Heerasing, founder and CEO of Prism MGA.

“The pace of change now is frightening,” he said. Thirty years ago, people still talked about telexes and fax machines, Heerasing said — but now, people are discussing having machines or AI make decisions on their behalf. “How do we, as humans, fit into that new dynamic?”

The AI era will shorten the amount of time it takes to train a young underwriter to the level of chief underwriting officer, said Ryan Kim, group chief technology & digital officer at FWD. “As long as the person can make the right decision and can monitor these right decisions, potentially, we’ll be seeing, like, [a person in] late twenties or early thirties [becoming] a chief underwriting officer,” he said.

With AI, junior underwriters will be able to start dealing with complex cases sooner.

“AI can be the catalyst accelerator of your career,” Kim said, provided staff get the right opportunities and mentors.

Kim brought up FWD’s experience in completing the first phase of the insurer’s agentic AI underwriting project in Japan, converting 167 disease codes into a format AI could understand.

The project was led by FWD’s chief underwriter in Japan, who is 68 and has 40 years of underwriting experience, Kim said. “We were basically emulating his routine process to make the right decision.”

By automating data collection and preparation, AI allows junior underwriters to start “at 70%, rather than from zero”, Kim said. “That actually tells the junior underwriter to understand which are the core components he or she needs to focus on to make the right decision.”

But while data collection is getting automated, AI still cannot replace leadership, Kim said.

Young insurance professionals should continue to stay curious, urged Renaud Guidée, CEO of AXA XL Reinsurance.

“Think about what lies beyond the scope of the assignment that was given to you, beyond the job description that you get when you start in the industry,” Guidée said. “What are others doing? What’s the outside-in perspective that other people would get on my job?”

Redefining leadership

The gap in how young professionals prioritise leadership and how executives view them partly reflects how each group has defined it. “When you join the workforce as a fresh graduate, you think of a leader as someone who has the final authority, or someone sitting in a boardroom or CEO,” Ho said. “But I think it’s actually more broad than that.”

Leadership can exist in a lot more informal ways — like influencing without formal authority, simplifying what’s complex, and taking ownership in situations where elements are unclear, Ho said.

Guidée recalled leading wildfire evacuations in southern France at age 24, an experience that taught him the importance of staying calm and being “super clear” in communicating objectives and aligning teams.

Garrad said the same principle applies to effective AI users. “They don’t overcomplicate it.”

As AI becomes embedded in workflows, he argued that sensemaking will become a key differentiator. “Seeing the pattern in the noise becomes a massively differentiating capability for human beings at work.”

Guidée cautioned that insurers should not lose sight of human judgement. “We should not lose sight of the fact that judgement is also about intuition and gut feeling.”