Mr Storah acknowledged that the firm was exploring “how many people do we need to grow this business going forward versus perhaps how many people we would have needed to grow over the last five years?” as it adopts AI tools.

He stated in an interview that the firm was exploring “how many people we need to grow this business going forward versus how many people we would have needed over the last five years.”

Mr Storah told The Insurance Times: “We want to keep growing as a business. We want to keep investing in making our people and our teams more effective, more efficient. In claims, for instance, AI means that 24 hours a day, a person who’s got a claim can call in and speak to somebody – whether it’s a person or a virtual assistant enabled by AI.

“We’re not making big calls and predictions about what [increased AI usage is] going to do structurally to our business. We know it’s changing our business. We know there are things that will be very different in the future. I don’t think it’s for us to make big proclamations to what the future is going to look like.

“What we care about is where do we see [AI] improving customer experience? Where do we see it making our people more efficient? Where does it mean that we get better cost outcomes, better indemnity outcomes? We’re looking at those things, but we see benefits across the enterprise from AI.”

It comes after the insurer made numerous references to its ongoing commitment to adopt AI and embed it within its operational and business practices, as part of its reporting of its half-year financial results last week.

Group chief executive Dame Amanda Blanc stated that Aviva has “a significant opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to deliver an even better service to customers, meet more of our customers’ needs over their lifetime and drive even more value for our shareholders”.

The firm stated: “We continue to invest in the business to support long-term growth, capture opportunities across our markets and accelerate transformation through artificial intelligence and data.

“Our multichannel distribution, scale, extensive proprietary data assets and single customer view underpin our unique customer advantage and provide strong foundations to deploy AI at scale across the group.

“We are already delivering tangible benefits from AI, from faster review times in medical underwriting to automated quality assurance in Wealth. There is more to come later in the year as we are set to launch our virtual assistant as well as rolling out our AI-enabled claims agent. Both of these solutions will be able to support our customers.”