Zurich Insurance wins a 2026 Qorus Award for its generative AI assistant, ZuriChat
Alexander Jung, Product Owner in Zurich’s Digital Employee Experience team, shares how ZuriChat, the company’s internal generative AI assistant, is helping colleagues work more effectively and focus on meaningful tasks.
Alexander Jung, Product Owner in Zurich’s Digital Employee Experience team, shares how ZuriChat, the company’s internal generative AI assistant, is helping colleagues work more effectively and focus on meaningful tasks.
Zurich Insurance won in the Operations & Workforce Excellence category at the Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026 for ZuriChat.
Can you introduce Zurich Insurance, yourself and tell us more about your role at your company?
Zurich Insurance is a leading global insurer with a long history of helping customers protect what matters most to them. Our purpose is to create a brighter future together. To deliver on that ambition, our employees need simple, secure and effective digital tools that help them focus on customers and meaningful work.
My name is Alexander Jung, and I am a Product Owner in Zurich’s Digital Employee Experience team. I am responsible for ZuriChat, Zurich’s internal generative AI assistant. ZuriChat supports colleagues with everyday tasks such as drafting and improving content, summarizing documents, translating text, analyzing information, coding and exploring ideas.
My role connects employee needs with technology, governance and adoption. Together with a broad network of experts and teams, we ensure ZuriChat is useful, secure, scalable and easy to use. The objective is not AI for its own sake. It is to enable colleagues to work more effectively and create more value for our customers.
What made you most proud of ZuriChat?
What makes me most proud is how colleagues have adopted ZuriChat and made it part of their daily work. We see it helping people reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, structure information faster and improve the quality of their outputs. This gives them more space for judgment, collaboration and customer-focused work.
I am also proud that we have made advanced AI accessible in a way that is appropriate for a global insurer. Trust is fundamental in our industry. We have to combine innovation and speed with responsible use, clear guardrails and practical guidance. Seeing employees use ZuriChat confidently, while understanding that human expertise and accountability remain essential, is a real success.
What’s the most important thing you would tell someone considering embarking on a similar project?
Start with real user problems, not the technology. Generative AI is powerful, but its value comes from solving concrete everyday challenges. Speak to users, understand where time and quality are being lost, and prioritize use cases that make a meaningful difference.
The second point is trust. Build governance, data protection, security and clear communication into the product from the beginning. AI adoption is not only a technology project; it is a change-management journey. Give people practical examples, simple guidance and a safe environment to experiment. Listen closely to feedback and improve continuously.
What’s coming next for ZuriChat?
Our ambition is to make ZuriChat available wherever colleagues work and establish it as a one-stop shop for coordinating and supporting their work. This means expanding access to relevant data and integrating more specialized agents and capabilities into one coherent experience.
We will also strengthen asset generation, including support for creating presentations and Word documents. In addition, integrating with Microsoft Graph through MCP capabilities will help ZuriChat provide more relevant, user-specific information in the right context, subject to the appropriate permissions and controls.
Finally, we are broadening our model portfolio. Greater model diversity will help us select the best capability for each task, improve resilience and strengthen our independence. Throughout this evolution, our focus remains unchanged: provide practical value while maintaining strong governance and responsible AI use.
What would you say to companies that might consider entering the 2027 Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards?
I would encourage them to enter. The process is valuable in itself because it makes teams reflect on the problem they are solving, the impact they are creating and what they have learned along the way.
Be specific about the value you deliver. Show real evidence of adoption, measurable outcomes and the people behind the innovation. And be open about challenges as well as successes. The strongest innovation stories are not only about new technology; they show how technology creates meaningful and responsible change.
What does this award mean to you and your innovation team?
Winning Gold is a tremendous recognition for everyone who contributed to ZuriChat. It reflects the work of a diverse group of colleagues across product, engineering, security, governance, design, communications and many business teams.
For us, the award is both a proud moment and motivation to go further. It confirms that employee-focused, responsible AI can make a real difference in insurance. But it is not the finish line. Our ongoing measure of success is whether ZuriChat helps colleagues do their best work and enables Zurich to serve customers even better.
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