India, Oct. 4 -- Almost every insurer today has an AI strategy. Many have multiple pilots running simultaneously across claims handling, fraud detection, underwriting support, and customer service. Boards are asking where AI can reduce costs. Vendors are promising transformation at extraordinary speed. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI in insurance. The question is why so many insurance AI programmes, despite genuine investment and genuine commitment, are still not delivering at scale.

The answer, in almost every case I have observed across enterprise deployments, is not the model. It is the data the model is asked to work with.

The insurance industry has some of the most comprehensive data in any organisation. There are dec...