Today, conflicts and catastrophes reverberate across continents with lightning speed. We have all seen recent events that have disrupted supply chains, plunged companies and consumers into distress, and forced policymakers to take actions with ramifications far beyond those initially affected. With globalization, businesses everywhere, large and small, have never been more vulnerable. Especially with the advent of super technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). Enticing and intimidating in their potential, super technologies are unleashing novel challenges in industries from agriculture to healthcare to finance.
The dawn of the Intelligent Age
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has branded this new era of AI-driven smart technologies The Intelligent Age. “It is up to us to determine whether it will lead to a future of greater equality, sustainability and collaboration—or if it will deepen divides that already exist,” he said.
Among those who will play a role in determining the outcomes are risk managers and insurers. While they are not the most high-profile actors, risk managers within companies and across the insurance industry are working to find ways to deal with and succeed in this new environment of global volatility. They are striving to ensure that businesses do not just survive but thrive by capitalizing on opportunity. The insurance industry is a pillar of stability that the financial and corporate sectors have relied upon for generations to operate safely and profitably even in tumultuous times. Its experience is indispensable.
However, in the Intelligent Age, the models and methods of the past may no longer be appropriate. Insurers in all fields are competing to build global networks to leverage scale, tap into multinational capabilities, and offer a breadth and depth of tools and expertise tailored to the specific needs of clients and their industries.
Financial literacy is the key
In this new age, insurers are turning Schwab’s words into action: they are collaborating. Armed with their existing in-house expertise and an array of smart AI-based tools, insurers are joining forces with a wider stable of talent, specialists and stakeholders. This holistic approach has enabled the industry to devise and deploy risk management strategies more effectively. Risk managers today see their role as working to prevent disasters before they occur. While using technology-based solutions to achieve that, they are not neglecting the human element: building their clients’ own risk-management capabilities. The key to that is to increase their financial literacy.
Financial literacy is a reservoir of knowledge that reaps invaluable rewards. Insurers possess this in abundance. Through their partnership, insurers can impart this knowledge to corporate executives and in-house risk managers, enabling them to clearly see the landscape of dynamic, rapidly changing threats. It will allow them to scope out potential perils and opportunities, strengthen defenses and drive performance towards positive results.
Insurers as enablers of global business
In the Intelligent Age, the best insurers are partners in prevention and protection. Through sharing knowledge and building financial literacy, insurers and their clients are designing new products and services, sometimes unique, that serve more effectively their interests and create advantages.
And they are doing it together. Insurers such as Sompo see these modes of collaboration as proving the value of insurance as a key enabler of global business in unpredictable times. As a global company with Japanese roots, Sompo Group’s multinational insurance arm approaches collaboration in the intelligent age as an important way to support global economic growth at a moment when the industry has never faced so many challenges.
The risk landscape is constantly in flux and is moving at a pace never before seen. Concerns about global stability, the impact of super technologies, and phenomena such as climate change are well founded. They drive action and mitigation. By exchanging knowledge and financial literacy, risk managers and clients can become a more powerful force in creating positive outcomes in this new, uncertain but potentially amazing era.
This article first appeared on Time Magazine for its special Davos issue, published to coincide with the Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The meeting convened under the theme “Collaboration in the Intelligent Age.”
