Zurich and Cytora: agentic AI turns multilingual commercial submissions into decision-ready risks across 11 countries, cutting triage from 75 to 15 minutes

Zurich Commercial Insurance has rolled out AI-driven submission intake for its mid-market business with risk digitisation platform Cytora, as part of its Z-Horizon+ programme to standardise underwriting across 20+ markets and 10+ lines of business. The problem was capacity. Underwriters manually read, reviewed and interpreted every incoming submission, typically unstructured documents in many languages, then re-keyed the data across disconnected systems. That left them able to act on only a fraction of inbound volume, with inconsistent prioritisation. The architecture splits intelligence from execution. Cytora runs as an upstream, headless layer that converts unstructured, multilingual submissions into structured risks aligned with Zurich's global underwriting standards, and AI agents enrich each risk with external data, including web research. Z-Horizon+, the downstream workbench, is where underwriters assess, quote and bind, or pass risks to specialist platforms. Outputs are delivered in local languages without local custom builds, and underwriting decisions stay with underwriters. Rollout speed came from standardisation. Because all lines of business share a subset of common data elements, Zurich harmonised those core fields globally into a Cytora Intake Master Schema, configured once and reused in every deployment, with local variation where needed. Delivery ran in three-month cycles covering batches of countries and lines, with monthly go-live drops. The first wave reached five countries in 90 days; by late 2025 the solution covered seven countries and two lines of business, Q1 2026 added four countries and four lines, and from Q2 2026 Zurich moved to a self-serve model, upskilling its own teams to launch new markets in twelve-week cycles. Local underwriter engagement was cited as a key adoption driver. "We're now at 11 (countries), and then we go to 22 by the end of the year," said John Martin, Application Portfolio Manager at Zurich. Manual triage time fell from 75 minutes to 15 minutes per submission, and the vendor reports intake straight-through processing rising from 10% to 95% and digitisation accuracy of 95% or more. These figures are company- and vendor-reported.