Aviva expands AI underwriting tool to critical illness

Aviva is expanding its AI-powered underwriting summary tool to individual critical illness applications.

The tool, first introduced for individual life insurance in November 2025, summarizes medical reports into concise, decision-ready insights. Aviva says it has improved efficiency and cut review time per case by around half.

With this move, Aviva is the first insurer to apply the technology to critical illness underwriting. The company extended its existing AI framework to handle the added complexity, including a wider range of medical conditions and risk factors, with testing showing similar accuracy to the life use case.

The tool supports front-end underwriting by helping assess applications at submission, and also enables post-application audits. Aviva plans to expand the summarization capability to income protection next.

“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. 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.” – Chief Underwriting Officer Robert Morrison.