Artificial intelligence was the dominant topic at the 2026 interim results briefings of China's five listed insurers, with terms such as "AI," "large models," "intelligent agents," and "digital-intelligent transformation" appearing 213 times combined 鈥?surpassing every other operational theme like investment returns and asset-liability matching.

According to statistics gathered from the five earnings conferences held by China Life Insurance, Ping An Insurance, PICC, China Pacific Insurance (CPIC), and New China Life Insurance, the phrase count underscores how AI vocabulary, including "token," has become the first hot keyword at these events during the first year of the "15th Five-Year Plan."

Behind these 213 mentions lies strategic deployment at the highest level. China Pacific Insurance has elevated "AI+" alongside senior care and internationalization as its three core strategies for the 15th Five-Year period. New China Life has made digital transformation a strategic and foundational priority for the same period. China Life President Li Mingguang listed "accelerating digital transformation" as one of six key directions for the second half of the year, stating the goal is to move from efficiency gains to comprehensive empowerment. PICC is implementing its "AI+" action plan, while Ping An summarizes its approach as "AI in all," advancing intelligent operations, management, business, service, and marketing across five scenarios simultaneously.

In its 2026 interim report, Ping An disclosed that its daily token consumption surged from roughly 30 billion in December 2025 to over 120 billion by June 2026. Notably, Ping An is the only one among the five listed insurers to disclose token usage figures in its report.

At the briefing, a reporter directly asked Ping An CFO Fu Xin about the connection between AI investment strategy and token consumption. Her reply was succinct: "Hundred-billion investment, trillion tokens." Fu Xin further stated that Ping An's core AI infrastructure investment phase is complete, and the company is now entering a stage focused on scenario application and value creation. She emphasized that AI investment logic starts by assessing the value of each scenario before deciding the scale of investment, adding that "AI is not technology for technology's sake."

China Life President Li Mingguang went a step further, linking computing power directly to production capacity: "Claims can now be processed in seconds, making computing power a key production factor."

The investment phase is now more than half complete, and the industry has entered a "value accounting" stage. Among the five, Ping An provided the most data. In the first half of the year, Ping An's AI-powered agents handled approximately 939 million service interactions, covering 81% of total customer service volume. AI-enabled intelligent agents facilitated sales of RMB 57.313 billion. Notably, 94% of life insurance policies received second-level underwriting, 57% of auto insurance claims were automatically inspected, and 94% of auto agency channel policies were issued in an average of one minute. In life insurance, the "111 Express Claims" flash claims accounted for 59% of all claims. Additionally, Ping An's financial large model ranked first overall in the CNFinBench public large language model leaderboard. The interim report also revealed that its quick-service AI assistant covers 88% of business scenarios, with 47 million user experiences in the first half.

China Life's report dedicated a special section to digital-intelligent operations, highlighting over 90 digital application scenarios and more than 500 intelligent agents across sales support, operations management, and customer service. Its intelligent underwriting review rate reached 96.8%, with digital underwriters handling over 37% of cases. The intelligent audit rate for policy services hit 99%, and digital-intelligent services accounted for over 75% of claims. Medical insurance one-stop direct claims exceeded 2.3 million cases. China Life also became the only financial institution in the first batch to pass the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology's trusted data space assessment.

At the results conference, Zhang Xinyu, Assistant President and Chief Cybersecurity Officer at China Life, said that large model-based auxiliary determination for accident and critical illness insurance liability has been deployed, cutting claims processing time to 0.36 days. An "AI private tutor" training system for sales staff has also been launched.

PICC's AI data was simpler: 246 applied AI scenarios and over 2.3 billion AI capability calls in the first half.

China Pacific Insurance disclosed at its briefing that its life insurance field-agent intelligent assistant "Xiaolan" has nearly 90,000 monthly active users. Agents using it deeply saw a 32% increase in first-year commission income, and their monthly performance rate climbed by 39.1 percentage points. In its property insurance arm, six AI application scenarios each reached ten-million-level usage, covering AI agents and AI-based loss reduction.

Importantly, none of the five insurers is using AI to replace agents; rather, AI is embedded in their sales toolkits. Beyond CPIC's "Xiaolan," Ping An has equipped agents and community financial specialists with intelligent marketing assistants, with Fu Xin noting that per-agent new business value rose over 10% in the first half. China Life's "AI private tutor" is aimed at sales training, while PICC uses intelligent assistants and AI sparring tools in auto insurance sales.

New China Life's management captured the philosophy succinctly: "Let machines do standardized work, let employees do more valuable work, achieving a dual improvement in efficiency and human touch."

On the product side, AI is expanding the scope of insurability. Ping An plans to launch a dedicated Alzheimer's disease insurance policy, leveraging data capabilities, AI diagnostics, and long-term disease management to offer coverage to a previously uninsurable population. PICC Health is pursuing a similar path, rolling out specialized products for liver disease, lung nodules, and breast cancer patients. Management stated that this move converts over 3 million previously uninsurable individuals into an insurable group.

Auto insurance pricing is also being rewritten. PICC has introduced vehicle intelligence data and ADAS factors into its new energy vehicle pricing model, refining risk identification granularity.

Thanks to their proficiency in AI, insurers are now pricing AI itself. PICC disclosed in its interim report that it has led the establishment of the Greater Bay Area AI Insurance Innovation Center, developed an innovative "Computing Power Insurance" product to fill a gap in computing industry risk coverage, and completed the country's first batch of embodied intelligent robot insurance claims.

China Pacific Insurance's report stated that it has launched multiple first-of-their-kind liability insurance products in areas such as artificial intelligence, low-altitude economy, and integrated circuits, while vowing to deepen research on AI-related risks and introduce new products and models.

While insurers use AI on the liability side, they are also investing in AI on the asset side. Liu Hui, Vice President of China Life, revealed that the company's investments in new quality productive forces exceed RMB 540 billion, with an average annual compound growth rate of 30%, focusing on AI, semiconductors, and senior care as core tracks.

Cai Zhiwei, Vice President of PICC, gave an example: an investment in Changxing Technology made in 2021, which went public in July 2026, returned over 20 times the initial investment. He said the group will continue to focus on AI, aerospace, and biomedicine.

Ping An's management described a coordinated approach across primary and secondary markets for tech stocks, with high-dividend foundational positions in the secondary market and participation in AI star projects through private equity in the primary market.

New China Life's interim report disclosed that its investment balance supporting digital industries, including AI, cloud computing, and big data, exceeds RMB 100 billion.

Of course, progress is uneven among the five. New China Life's report still describes AI applications in terms of "launching smart customer service digital humans, intelligent claims projects, and internet intermediary Q&A assistants," reflecting a stage gap when compared to the more mature operational data of the other four.

Yet New China Life's briefing arguably offered the most vivid expression. Management shared a detail from a discussion with young employees: when asked what resource support they needed most, the answer was simply, "Give us more tokens."