Agentic AI Hyperchallenge Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Over the course of 12 weeks, the Agentic AI Hyperchallenge is Zurich’s groundbreaking open innovation platform that engaged 1,000+ participants from 40+ countries, individual developers, startups, hyperscalers, and internal teams to co-create 218 working prototypes across 17 real- world insurance use cases.

Unlike traditional hackathons, we provided participants with anonymized but real Zurich data, direct access to business experts, and clearly defined success metrics. This created an unprecedented learning laboratory where innovators tested agentic AI against actual insurance complexity while allowing Zurich Insurance to simultaneously gain immediate vendor ecosystem intelligence.

This unique experience lead to transformative results: 218 working prototypes across 17 real-world insurance use cases from different business units and lines of businesses / 34 enterprise-ready finalists, 5 winners that are now in production pilots, and validated insights essentially proving how small AI-native teams achieve 10x productivity gains, knowledge-graph architectures outperform traditional approaches, and prototypes deliver measurable impact in just a couple of weeks.

The HyperChallenge innovates using the minds of startups, employees and partners in an accelerated 12 weeks hackathon, with working solutions solving real company challenges. Thereby, we have transformed technology adoption from “PowerPoint and promises” to evidence- based evaluation, creating a repeatable model that delivers in just a couple of weeks what traditional approaches require 18+ months to achieve.