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Insurance firm Axa has said accelerating its use of AI could deliver a boost of as much as 700 million euro (£599 million) to help automate processes such as underwriting, claims management and customer contact.

The French company unveiled a new growth strategy which it hopes will bolster its earnings and make it more competitive in the insurance market.

This includes efforts to “systematically embed data and AI across its value chain, transforming the way the group operates”, the company told investors.

Axa said it expects to generate between 500 and 700 euro (£428 million £599 million) worth of annual benefits from AI by 2029, based on its current projections for how the technology will be deployed to make the business more efficient.

AI and advanced analytics are being used in different ways including within its contact centres, by using AI assistants to deal with customer queries, and sales activity to give customers personalised offers.

The company is implementing AI-supported underwriting which is the process of assessing the risk associated with each insurance policy in a bid to prioritise opportunities that have the highest value and speed up the process.

Other use cases include automated claims management and using AI to help set prices.

The company’s new commitments come after official figures suggested that increased business spending on AI helped the UK economy grow in July.

However, it also comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over its rapid global expansion, with the boss of Anthropic recently calling for the pace of development in the AI industry to “slow down” to give safety measures time to catch up.

Chief executive Dario Amodei wrote in an essay that he was concerned about AI “advancing drastically faster” since the summer and that the technology could be capable of taking over the entire internet.

Meanwhile, Axa said its new strategy will “build the Axa of the next decade” as it set new financial targets for the next three years including underlying earnings per share growth of between 7% and 9%.