Digital broking and underwriting technology provider Artificial Labs has launched AgLabs, a new research and innovation arm which aims to harness agentic AI to meet the needs of clients in the specialty and commercial insurance sectors.

The initiative will explore the issue of how AI will reshape market interactions, aiming to pair long-term research and development with immediately deployable capabilities to help brokers and underwriters remove friction while laying the foundations for agent-to-agent market coordination over time.

A2A interactions allow broker and underwriter agents to exchange, validate and clarify information autonomously under granular controls, while keeping decisions human. It will focus on the layer where risk information is exchanged, clarified, translated and negotiated. Despite decades of digital investment, this stage of the process remains manual, email-driven, and time-consuming. Research conducted by AgLabs among London market participants shows that 88% of broker submissions are not decision-ready when they first reach an underwriter’s inbox.

David King, co-founder of Artificial Labs, said: “AgLabs is built for a human-led market. Its purpose is to remove the administrative friction that consumes time and slows decision-making. Insurance professionals are paid for their expertise, not for chasing missing data across endless email chains. AgLabs keeps people at the centre of the process while removing the friction that slows markets down. Our agents can do the legwork of coordination and clarification in the background, but the decision and accountability always stay with the human.”