Announcement
Zurich, ETH Zürich and HSG launch the Zurich AI Lab
Zurich Insurance, ETH Zürich and the University of St. Gallen (HSG) have founded a joint research lab on artificial intelligence in insurance. The lab pairs an insurer's live deployments with academic rigour to study not whether AI works, but the conditions under which it can be trusted with a decision someone must answer for.
The Zurich AI Lab was founded on 29 October 2025 as a joint initiative of Zurich Insurance, ETH Zürich and the University of St. Gallen (HSG). It brings together an insurer’s operational reality, ETH’s technical depth, and HSG’s work on management, governance and decision-making under one roof.
The premise is narrow on purpose. Public debate about AI in insurance still turns on a single binary — will it replace the underwriter, the claims handler, the broker? That is the wrong unit of analysis. An insurer does not buy a model; it carries a risk, and someone has to be accountable for the price it put on that risk. The useful questions are about deployments: a specific system, doing a specific task, inside a specific book of business. Where can such a system reach expert-level judgement? Where does it fail, and are those failures the kind a reviewer can catch? What does the human do once the work arrives already half-done?
The lab studies these questions in real deployment settings as the work develops, rather than through demonstrations — concentrating on where a system reaches expert-level judgement, how the human role changes, and who remains accountable for the decision.
This page records the founding fact only. The lab’s way of working is set out across the rest of the site; its outputs will develop in public as the work matures. For the official announcement, see the Zurich press release linked above.