How Allianz Partners Is Replacing Claims Operations with Autonomous AI Agents

Allianz Partners processes over 90 million cases per year across health, automotive, and travel insurance. At that scale, a single claim could take 29 days to resolve end-to-end, across dozens of disconnected systems, and the operating model scaled linearly with volume: more cases required more people, with no leverage and no path to margin expansion. The company is now replacing that model entirely, using Otera's Autonomous AI agents, with a global rollout already live across multiple markets.

The operating model that couldn't close the gap

The urgency wasn't abstract. CEO Tomas Kunzmann put it directly: "Time was against us. If we didn't act quickly, we risked losing half of our value chain."

Responsiveness was the single metric connecting both sides of the business. Faster resolution drives customer retention; lower cost per claim expands margin. The two levers move together, and the existing model had no mechanism for moving either at speed. What was needed wasn't an improvement to the existing process. It was a different category of system entirely: one capable of making decisions across the full claims lifecycle, not patching individual steps within it.

What running autonomously actually looks like

Two use cases went live within 2.5 months across UK and DACH markets before global rollout.

Autonomous claims execution now runs the full lifecycle. Agents review incoming claims, validate coverage against policy terms, assess liability, settle cases, generate customer responses, and trigger payment. The complete chain runs across product lines, languages, and regulatory environments. Complex cases escalate to human specialists; everything else doesn't.

Autonomous provider invoice management covers millions of invoices from Allianz Partners' 16,500-strong partner network. Agents handle ingestion, processing, service validation against contractual terms, and payment decisions. A process that once required proportional headcount growth to absorb partner network volume no longer does.

The results already in the market are significant. Average claims handling time has dropped from 29 days to 3.5 days, with a substantial volume of cases resolving in minutes. 70% of claims now settle in under 12 hours. Customer satisfaction scores have moved sharply in the same period.

What makes this work at scale is decision accuracy compounding across steps. As Otera CEO Stefan Engl describes it: "If you have 80% decision accuracy across 10 steps, you land near zero correct outcomes. At 99%, you're in the 90% range. That's the difference between a system that works in a demo and one that runs in production." The architecture reflects this: agents are scoped precisely so they operate at very high accuracy within their domain, and the governance layer gives operators full visibility into every decision with the ability to trace, explain, and override.

Allianz Partners bypassed proof-of-concept cycles entirely. CDO Pieter Viljoen's view is that these capabilities should be treated as platform infrastructure from the start, not validated case by case. The organizational shift required to get there was equally significant: letting the system make decisions end-to-end without layering legacy logic on top of it. The analogy Viljoen uses is instructive. Nobody asks how OCR works when they use a language model. They trust that it does. Extending that trust to a full autonomous claims process is the real transition, and Allianz Partners has made it.

What comes next

These results anchor a broader transformation program targeting €300M in incremental annual profit by 2027, against a revenue growth trajectory from €10 billion to €13 billion. The targets are forward-looking, but they are grounded in production-scale results already running across live markets.

The ambition extends further still. Viljoen has described the current moment as one where the gates are open: more use cases, more markets, more business lines already in scope. Allianz Partners has moved from asking whether autonomous claims execution works to scaling it as the operational default.

Read the full Allianz Partners case study →

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