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AI can support better work, but relationships, curiosity and human initiative remain essential to progress in specialty insurance.
Published on October 13, 2026
By Sucheng Chang
Managing Director, Asia Pacific
7-minute read
Over the past year, I’ve fielded a steady stream of questions from our people at Markel about how we’re using AI and where it can add value. We’re currently implementing region-wide training, enabling our people to make the most of the tools available to them to surface information and insights more effectively. The question underneath that training is not whether AI has a role to play. It clearly does. The more important question is what we, as people, need to keep bringing to the work.
That question sat at the heart of this year’s Dive In festival, including Markel Singapore’s virtual panel on Technology Enabling Performance, where Alvernia Xu, Head of Operations, Asia Pacific, explored how AI can support human judgement, collaboration and expertise. Dive In has always been a gathering ground for thinking that matters to the insurance sector, which is why Markel has been a global sponsor for more than a decade. As the festival comes to a close after 12 years, its final theme feels timely: not what humans lose to technology, but what people continue to gain, build and contribute when technology increasingly becomes part of the way we work.
I like that framing, because my answer has not changed since the first time I heard the question, and I always come back to three things: relationships, curiosity and hustle.
AI can do a great deal and, used well, it can help people do better work. What it won’t do is ask itself to be ambitious – at least not yet! It doesn’t get curious about a problem nobody assigned to it. It doesn’t decide to learn a new skill because it can see where the business is heading. It does not put its hand up. Those things still need a person, and in my experience they separate the people who progress from the people who do a good job and stay put.
We see that across the business. Colleagues who understand a problem deeply are finding practical ways to use technology to make work faster, simpler and more useful for the people around them. The job description may not ask them to build a tool or rethink a process, but they do it because they can see the opportunity.
AI can help build those kinds of tools quickly now. Does it matter if a human does every part of the coding going forward? No, of course not. The idea, the judgement and the outcome are what matter, and those come down to human initiative.
A region built on relationships
Specialty insurance, in particular, is a relationship business. The risks we write are often complex, and brokers, clients and their boards need to trust the human judgement behind each decision. That’s why the time AI saves our underwriters is going back into the market, into more time with brokers and clients to better understand risk, rather than being banked as a cost saving. In a region like ours, relationships are also how the business works day to day. Our teams across Asia Pacific each face a different market, with different clients, different regulators and different ways of doing business. What they share is access to the same specialist expertise and the same global network, and the autonomy to decide how that expertise is applied at home.
AI can help people do better work. What it won't do is ask itself to be ambitious.
A specialty insurance business only works if the person closest to the risk is the trusted expert who makes the call. That expertise only holds, though, if they can pick up the phone to a colleague who has seen the same sort of problem before, whether that colleague sits two desks away or several time zones away. Trust and shared knowledge depend on each other. We can give people the authority to make decisions locally because the expertise behind those decisions is shared across the whole business. And that expertise keeps moving because people trust that a call for help will always be welcome.
The mix of backgrounds and languages across the region makes that harder in some ways and far more valuable in others. Different markets produce different instincts, and when a team brings those instincts into the same conversation it understands the clients it serves better than any one office could on its own. Much of what our people learn, they learn from each other.
Our marine teams have shown what that looks like in practice over the past year, and continue to do so. As vessels are rerouted, sanctions positions shift and clients face fast-moving disruption across key trade corridors, our marine war teams in Singapore and China have been working around the clock to keep clients moving. They’re acknowledging submissions within minutes, turning quotes around quickly and helping brokers through sanctions issues, shipping disruption and geopolitical developments as they unfold. That speed comes from colleagues across the region joining daily calls and coordinating in real time, bringing underwriting, claims and compliance expertise into one conversation. The work has been recognised with two InsuranceAsia News Country Awards for Excellence for Outstanding Customer Service, one in Singapore and one in China. I’m proud of those awards, and prouder still of how they’re being earned.
Belonging follows from that. People feel they belong when their expertise is seen and used, when a colleague in another country knows their name and asks for their view, and when they can see that someone in a smaller or newer office has the same shot at the interesting work as someone in an established hub. That's something leaders have to build on – purpose. I take it seriously because I’ve been the person who arrived in an office on the other side of the world where nobody knew me yet.
AI certainly has a role to play here. It can help make collaboration and communication easier, and it can free up time for people to spend on the conversations that matter. But the strength of the work that comes out of these processes still depends on people and teams being willing to interact, share expertise and build trust.
So when someone asks me what value they add in a world where AI can do more of the work every year, I tell them what I believe. The value is not in the task alone. It’s in noticing what nobody asked you to notice, building the relationship nobody assigned to you, and putting your hand up for the assignment on the other side of the world. No technology will do that for you. For those of us who lead, the job is to make sure that when someone does put their hand up, our systems, processes and culture enable them to fully explore their initiative.
Sucheng Chang
Managing Director, Asia Pacific