Inside the AI-Driven Hiring Wave in Insurance
With AI rewriting the playbook of talent acquisition, BFSI GCCs, which are projected to exceed 250 by 2030, up from the current 120, are transforming workforce dynamics. According to Careernet, a leading talent solutions provider, nearly 50% of BFSI GCCs already have an employee base exceeding 1,000, while 15% employ over 10,000 professionals. To keep pace with this rapid growth and the industry’s demands, organisations are ramping up hiring across a wide range of areas, including technology, analytics, next-gen capabilities, infrastructure, functional expertise, and operations. However, what truly sets this transformation apart is the sector’s increasing shift away from traditional domain silos. With data and AI-driven technologies at the core, talent is now evaluated not by industry background alone, but by adaptability, digital fluency, and problem-solving potential. This makes cross-sector mobility and industry-agnostic hiring the new normal. Anuj Khurana, CEO and co-founder of Anaptyss, a digitally enabled managed services company, told AIM that the critical skills these centres are looking for include programming languages like Python and R, risk management frameworks, AI and ML proficiency, and descriptive analytics. Talking to AIM on this, Josh Everett, CEO of Zinnia India, a technology company with deep insurance expertise, stated that the company’s approach to talent acquisition is rooted in a tech-driven mindset that values diversity in experience over traditional industry alignment. “We hired somebody…three months ago from the aerospace industry,” he explained. “We’re finding people from different industries, at different stages in life, with different experiences. It’s not everybody just with insurance [background]. The focus is on technological capabilities, and then we help train and develop them in our industry through ongoing on-the-job training and development.” Everett also highlighted the central role of interpreting data, especially when drawing parallels between aerospace and insurance. This helps in bringing a fresh perspective to the sector. How Automation is a Big Play For Zinnia in India “Automation is a big play here in India for us in order to remove the human touch, which improves our quality and improves real-time interaction,” Everett explained. He added that the company has three major go-to-market products, all of which are actively being developed by their global teams including India. Talking about Zinnia’s products, Everett highlighted Zinnia Now—a solution that introduces a UI/UX layer that sits on top of systems of record. This solution provides a single pane of glass for consumers, agents, carriers, and internal folks to interact with the record on file. Another key product, Zinnia Launch, focuses on drastically accelerating product deployment timelines for carriers. As Everett puts it, it’s about using data, AI, and the latest and greatest technology to help carriers launch products lightning fast. “It used to take one year to 18 months to launch a new product. With Zinnia Launch, we’re able to launch products within three months.” The third product, Zinnia Market Connect, is designed to bridge the gap between consumers and financial professionals. Zinnia Market Connect allows consumers to connect with advisors and financial professionals to find the right product, educate themselves on the product, apply for the product, and ultimately get it in force. Everett emphasised that all of these innovations are being actively supported by India team. Moreover, the India team is spearheading chatbot development and intelligent automation. The company’s business operating procedures are digitised through a ChatGPT-like feature. AI Agents to Reduce Friction The focus, Everett explained, is on eliminating friction in customer engagement and delivering custom fit solutions and services. To attain this, the company leverages AI agents. “We do about…1.5 million call summaries on an annualised basis on every call that comes in. We drive that through analytics so we understand what capability we could provide you on a portal that would answer your question versus a call,” he added. The company is also working towards enabling chatbots to proactively reach out to customers and talk to them about their questions. Furthermore, Everett explained that the broader role of AI in the organisation is in data strategy. Zinnia uses large language models (LLMs) to analyse call data. “We are building LLMs—the AI call summaries I talked about leverage large LLM models that help us take that, understand sentiment, understand agent propensity to recall, understand consumer propensity to recall, understand did we answer it, what could we have done better?” The company leverages multiple different models and continues to learn from them and advance from them. Zinnia’s teams in Pune and in Bengaluru are helping develop and continue to expand the capabilities of the digital ledger. 10x Plus Growth Every Year Zinnia has experienced consistent growth of over 10% year-over-year, with some years seeing significantly higher expansion. In the previous year, the company notably doubled its workforce in India following the acquisition of a portion of Ebix, a firm known for its life and annuity support services. This strategic move increased Zinnia’s employee count in India from approximately 750 to around 1,500. The expanded team now includes over 1,200 associates focused on product development, engineering, and project management. In addition, there are more than 500 service personnel delivering various operational capabilities.
With data and AI-driven technologies at the core, talent is now evaluated not by industry background alone, but by adaptability, digital fluency, and problem-solving potential.
With data and AI-driven technologies at the core, talent is now evaluated not by industry background alone, but by adaptability, digital fluency, and problem-solving potential.
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["AI", "ML", "analytics", "ChatGPT", "Aim", "RAG", "chatbots", "Python", "R", "Go"]
Shalini is a senior tech journalist, exploring the latest advancements in AI. When she's not reporting on the latest innovations, you can find her immersed in her next literary adventure.