Insurance giant Allstate is looking to strike a balance between reducing costs and funding technology investments as it strives to carve out a place for itself in an agentic marketplace.
Personal agentic AI assistants such as Meta’s Muse give Allstate the opportunity to serve customers who prefer machines to handle transactions, CEO Tom Wilson told investors during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call Wednesday. Wilson said Allstate’s goal is to work with outside agents, not against them, to show customers branded products as they interact.
“We will be available to all personal agents,” he said during the call.
It’s another example of Allstate’s aggressive push to capitalize on AI as several industry players pursue the technology’s adoption. Earlier this year, the insurer introduced its proprietary agentic AI platform: Allstate’s large language intelligent ecosystem, known as Allie, to handle agent-to-agent processing. On Wednesday, Wilson said the rollout is accelerating.
He also reported that 97% of employees are now certified as AI-enabled, AI code production was 3.6 times higher in Q3 than in Q1, and Ask Allstate, a customer service AI assistant that the company launched in July, is managing 15% of chat volume with good results.
Next year, the company is aiming to push even more into personal assistants with the launch of its own protection-focused personal AI agent, which plays a part in Allstate’s strategy to work with outside agents and get their insurance product in front of customers.
Allstate’s AI agent will bring the company’s own expertise and price comparison ability to bear, giving third-party agents a product to route customers to, which Wilson described as a “win-win for everybody.”
“Its value proposition includes more accurate pricing given our insurance expertise than the general purpose [personal agentic assistants] will have,” he said. “It will also provide consumers with context on the type of coverage that’s right for them and straight-through processing.”
Along with AI progress, Wilson also addressed how it is reconciling the uptick in the company’s investment in technology, which includes higher software and computing costs.
“We’ve made a lot of changes in the way we deploy technology,” he said. “Today, we have 25% fewer people in technology than we did four years ago, and that’s not just using AI.”
Getting the most value out of AI
As insurer Manulife scales its AI capabilities, it’s plotting a course toward $1 billion in total enterprise AI value by 2027, a goal CEO Phil Witherington told investors the company is well on its way to achieving.
“Becoming an AI-powered organization is key to improving experiences, transforming process, creating greater competitive differentiation and delivering value,” Witherington said during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call Wednesday.
During the quarter, Witherington said Manulife expanded its strategic partnership with Microsoft, extending Copilot access to more than 30,000 employees and deploying Microsoft Agent 365 to “enhance productivity, support innovation and strengthen enterprise AI governance.”
