View of St Paul's Cathedral from Hiscox Office

How AI is ‘supercharging’ Hiscox employees ‘to do what they’re great at’

Hiscox, the global specialist insurer, is rolling out the generative AI assistant Microsoft 365 Copilot to its 3,000+ employees across 14 countries. This has already resulted in productivity and time wins – and much excitement at the firm.

Specialist insurance provider Hiscox prides itself on providing a service to its customers that is ‘personal, specialist and effortless’.

And it believes Microsoft 365 Copilot is helping them to deliver on this commitment.

The company, which insures anything from wedding photographers and fitness instructors to listed buildings, art collections and cargo ships, is rolling out the technology to all 3,000+ of its employees across 14 countries, following a successful trial.  

“Microsoft 365 Copilot is the perfect tool for us because it’s embedded within all the productivity tools our colleagues already use,” explains Chris Loake, Group Chief Information Officer at Hiscox.

Chris Loake-CIO-Hiscox
Chris Loake says Microsoft 365 Copilot is freeing up colleagues to offer more personalised customer service

“It’s easy to turn on, it’s easy to use, and it enables our colleagues to do what they’re great at – focusing on customers instead of spending time on admin.”

Simplifying and streamlining

One of the first people at Hiscox to experience the benefits of working with Microsoft 365 Copilot was Ian Howard, a senior technical claims underwriter in the UK claims team.

With an active claim portfolio, he was quick to see the potential that Copilot offered to make many areas of his work more efficient. The impact it’s had has exceeded his expectations.

“We handle a variety of claims – from medical malpractice to property damage – which involves a range of complex work processes,” he explains.

“Copilot helps to streamline them and simplify the huge amount of information we have to absorb and translate into a response for our customers.”

Hiscox Building Exterior
Hiscox specialises in insuring small businesses

After working with GenAI for a year, Howard says he now uses Copilot for half of his work, resulting in impressive time savings and productivity gains.

Identifying and recording the key information from a new claim now takes him as little as 10 minutes – a task that previously took up to an hour.

Using just a handful of prompts, he is able to extract information about the progress of a claim from multiple emails and compose a new message to update a broker or customer.

And summarising thousands of pages of expert medical evidence and complex legal advice for claims where that is needed now takes him a matter of minutes.

Howard says using Copilot means he can focus his time and attention on higher-level decision-making and communication, leading to better outcomes for customers.

Champions network

His experience is echoed by colleagues company-wide, says Steph Bateman, a product owner for end-user experience and adoption at Hiscox: “The main benefit of rolling out Copilot is that it frees people up from repetitive tasks and gives them the time back to focus on value-add activities that are more important to the business.”

Hiscox-Colleagues Chatting
Hiscox is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to all 3,500 of its employees

It means Howard and his colleagues in the claims team are able to concentrate on assessing the impact that expert evidence has on a claim, instead of spending hours collating the key points from a report manually.

Howard is now championing the use of Copilot more widely across the Claims team and beyond. He’s one of a growing network of AI champions creating a sense of excitement around Copilot across the entire business.

Creating a buzz

Just two years since the insurer first introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, the number of employees using it has increased from 300 to over 3,000, says Bateman.

This rapid adoption has been driven in no small part by demand – at one point, there were more than 200 people on the waiting list for a Copilot license, Bateman says.

“I was getting countless emails, Teams messages and phone calls every day, and people coming up to me in the office,” she recalls.

Stephanie Bateman, Hiscox
Steph Bateman says there is ‘a real buzz’ about Copilot among colleagues

“There was a real buzz around Copilot, and the demand for it ramped up because of the positive things that people who had been using it had to say about it.”

Even those who were initially apprehensive about using AI have been won over once they’ve seen it in action, she adds.

“The ‘Eureka moment’ for people has been when they see that using one prompt in Copilot can save them an hour on a task that would otherwise have taken them four. Very quickly, people then start to wonder how much time it could save them on other tasks, too,” she says.

Drop-in sessions supported by Microsoft; shared prompt libraries; a dedicated Teams channel for Copilot champions offering peer-to-peer support; and live demos at the Hiscox Tech Summit, have also helped Hiscox employees develop and refine the skills they need to get the most from the technology, Bateman adds.

Agentic future

Looking ahead, the insurer is thinking about exploring the use of AI agents – specialised digital assistants that can operate independently or in the background, automating specific tasks or processes.

“Some of the most striking benefits will be where we’re able to speed up customer transactions, where we can service a customer faster and more accurately because our colleagues have that customer’s data at their fingertips,” Loake predicts.

“AI is really supercharging what we do.”