Insurance Innovation Case Studies

How Zurich Stayed Ahead of an AI-First Disruptor - USA + EU

Zurich did not wait around when an AI-first competitor started disrupting insurance globally. They made a deliberate decision to respond with a fresh approach, increase agility, and innovate in a way that would hold up in the market, not just inside meeting rooms.

Over 9 months across Europe and the US, we embedded as a coaching and delivery partner alongside 2–4 cross-functional teams working on live projects. The goal was not “more ideas”. It was better ideas, tested faster, and prioritised in a way leadership could defend. We used a set of ideation and prioritisation frameworks anchored in a simple triad: desirable, viable, feasible, so teams stopped defaulting to opinions and started making clearer trade-offs.

The most valuable outcome was not a single product. It was strategic advantage. By mapping the innovation idea-space, Zurich could see which directions were most likely to be copied by competitors, and which bets would actually differentiate them. That shifted decision-making beyond “what should we launch next” to “what should we own, what should we avoid, and what do we want competitors reacting to”.

In short, Zurich didn’t just build an innovation pipeline. They upgraded how they make decisions under competitive pressure, and used it to stay ahead of what the market was about to do next.

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Making Digital Wellness Something People Choose

AXA wanted to increase engagement in a digital wellness product for corporate clients, not by adding more features, but by making the experience feel worth coming back to. Most wellness platforms fail for the same reason. They treat behaviour change like a task, not a system, and they ignore the fact that community is what keeps people in the game.

Over 3 months across Europe, we worked with the Product Owner to run customer discovery, map the experience end to end, and design a new engagement model. We combined behavioural segmentation (motivation types) with journey thinking and early prototyping, so decisions were grounded in how people actually behave, not how a dashboard says they behave.

The redesigned engagement model was built around two principles. First, community drives retention. Second, game mechanics change the emotional tone. It becomes something people choose to do, not something they feel they should do. We translated those principles into a practical experience flow and feature direction, then used initial prototypes to validate the approach with corporate client decision-makers (the people who buy and roll out these programmes).

After validation, AXA created a roadmap to build out many of the features, turning the work into an execution plan rather than a concept. The result was a clearer path to a wellness product that clients can confidently deploy, and employees are more likely to stick with over time.