The insurance industry is learning to crawl before it runs with agentic AI. Others will follow suit.

There's a moment every market goes through with transformative technology where the hype cycle peaks. Every vendor claims they've already solved it. Boards start asking why you haven't deployed it yet. The practitioners, the ones actually running operations at scale, start publishing what they've learned.

That moment has arrived for agentic AI in insurance.

In May 2026, Forrester, a leading global research and continuous guidance firm, published a Trends Report titled Advance Agentic AI In Insurance With Discipline, Not Hype. Parloa was among the companies interviewed for the research. The report examines where insurers are generating real value, where they're running into walls, and how to sequence the journey from cautious pilot to scaled deployment.

Reading it, we recognized something familiar. Not because we’re cited in it, but because we experience it with our customers every day.

What this says about where agentic AI goes from here

Insurance has always been a reliable leading indicator for how regulated industries approach technology. High stakes. Real governance requirements. Significant interaction volume. When insurers figure something out, other industries tend to follow.

The discipline of choosing use cases carefully, building foundations before scaling, and bringing frontline teams into the process early enough for them to actually shape it goes beyond the insurance industry. It's the universal story of how agentic AI delivers results that stick.

There's a version of this that looks good in a Q3 board update and falls apart in Q4. Then there's a version that actually compounds, where each deployment builds the data quality, governance infrastructure, and organizational trust that the next one depends on.

The companies doing it well know the difference. Even when they’re running, they realize it’s not a race to be first. They’ve just got to be strategic in their pacing.

Parloa was interviewed for the research referenced in this post. The full report — "Advance Agentic AI In Insurance With Discipline, Not Hype," Forrester Research, Inc., May 2026 — is available to Forrester clients and subscribers.

Forrester research customers: Read the full report →