Insurance Australia Group (IAG) has started working on ways to make its software engineering functions more AI driven, beginning with the way it builds and manages its APIs.
The general insurer, which currently underwrites $17 billion worth of premium insurance in Australia and New Zealand, is in the midst of a transformation project to integrate multiple platforms across the organisation’s brands to improve governance and chase out cost.
Speaking at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour Sydney event, the insurer’s head of integration Lloyd Thomas said that, as a result of the transformation, the organisation had deployed Mulesoft’s Anypoint API Experience Hub integration platform and is now trying to move around 600 APIs onto the platform.
The project, he said, had prompted IAG to consider how to manage its APIs to take advantage of developments in AI.
One of the business cases that stood out, he said, is to streamline its software development functions by instituting a change in mindset across its engineering divisions to one that accommodated more use of AI prompt-driven skills.
“This is [at] scale. If you’ve got a thousand or [even] two thousand engineers, if we can just get them to a mind frame of just using prompting and skills to be able to do their work that’s going to unlock a lot of capacity.
“There’s a massive win for us in that space and we’re starting to deploy that in how we do our [API] migration plus how we build new APIs,” Thomas said.
Thomas said he had been inspired by the OpenClaw agentic personal AI assistant after spending a weekend playing with it.
“I think we’re going to end up there in some shape or form,” he said.
However, he said that the exercise highlighted the challenges that regulated organisations like IAG face with agentic AI.
“You get back into the enterprise world and IAG is a company … it’s a brand that’s [built] around help, and that means safety, trust, [and] reliability. So how we go with that approach in an organisation that is regulated has to be measured,” Thomas said.
Thomas said that the company’s API platform migration was partly inspired by the need for a single view of its APIs, following the open banking initiative which started mid-2020.
The Optus data breach which occurred later that year and involved an unauthenticated API endpoint which was exposed to the public internet served to reinforce the business case for the project, he said.
“We didn’t have a single view of all our APIs in the organisation, and who owned those APIs. That was a key decision point … how do we get something in place from a developer portal perspective, or an API catalogue in place so that we can just track all of our assets?” he explained.
Thomas said that before deploying MuleSoft, IAG had attempted to build its own developer portal as part of its open banking but that it “never went live”.
Having established strong data governance controls using MuleSoft’s platform, Thomas said IAG is eager to ensure that they survived the transition to agentic AI, whatever approach the insurer took.
“How do we apply that to agents? I think the challenge we’re going to have here is MuleSoft versus the hyperscalers and where does that fit into the ecosystem at IAG? We’ve got something here – do we need again [to have] that conversation about build or can we leverage capability that’s available to us?
“But [the question] for me now is how you make these APIs agent aware. I think it’s the next evolution and that’s going to be a massive unlock for digital experiences and how that’s going to change in the future.”
