Aviva is expanding its AI underwriting summarisation tool to support individual critical illness (CI) insurance applications. The move means the insurer will now be able to summarise most individual protection applications where a medical report is required.
The tool, the first of its kind in the protection market when it launched for individual life insurance applications in November 2025, has already delivered significant improvements in underwriting efficiency and turnaround times.
Aviva’s AI underwriting capability focuses on the front end of the journey, supporting underwriters to make decisions more quickly from the point of application.
Aviva will be the first insurer to offer this technology in the CI market and has built on the previous delivery by reusing and extending this capability for CI underwriting, seeing the same high levels of accuracy in testing.
This work enables Aviva’s AI underwriting tool to handle the added complexity of CI underwriting by validating summarisation quality and accuracy across a wider range of conditions and risk factors.
The tool uses generative AI to analyse medical reports. This means that lengthy, complex reports can be condensed into short summaries that contain the relevant information for underwriters to review. According to Aviva, this has reduced the time underwriters spend reviewing each case by around half.
"Building on the recent launch of our life insurance AI summarisation underwriting tool, this is another important step in our commitment to making protection insurance faster, simpler and more accessible for our customers using generative AI," Robert Morrison, chief underwriting officer at Aviva, said.
He added: "Throughout development, we’ve focused on enhancing the stages of the underwriting journey that deliver the most material gains for customers, advisers and our underwriters in both service and efficiency. Our current capability also extends to post-application auditing, and our next focus will be on delivering summarisation for income protection.
"By bringing AI summarisation to the protection market, we’re helping more customers get the protection they need more quickly."
