(Hong Kong, 9 September 2026) Prudential Hong Kong Limited (“Prudential”) today announced the full launch of AI Underwriter, an AI-powered underwriting solution developed in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, a global leading provider of AI infrastructure and the intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, making preliminary underwriting guidance available to all Prudential financial consultants within minutes.
The launch of AI Underwriter represents a significant milestone in Prudential’s application of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the insurance journey. Combining Prudential’s underwriting expertise with Alibaba Cloud’s AI capabilities, AI Underwriter enables financial consultants to obtain preliminary underwriting indications through a chatbot at the point of sale, based on information such as a customer’s financial, medical, occupational and residential profile.
The AI solution can provide preliminary indications on acceptance, exclusion, loading or additional information required within minutes, helping financial consultants better understand potential underwriting requirements before application submission and giving customers greater clarity and peace of mind earlier in the journey.
Lawrence Lam, Chief Executive Officer, Prudential Hong Kong Limited, said: “AI Underwriter marks an important step forward in how Prudential works with leading ecosystem partners to bring practical innovation into the insurance journey. Our collaboration with Alibaba Cloud reflects our belief that the future of insurance will be shaped not by technology alone, but by how effectively we combine industry expertise, trusted partnerships and real-world execution. For us, this is what AI leadership means — making insurance simpler, faster and stronger for customers and our distribution channels. Above all, AI enables us to anticipate customer needs and act earlier, delivering greater transparency and better outcomes.”
Ethan Yuan, Vice President of International Business, Regional General Manager of APAC North, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: “AI Underwriter exemplifies how full-stack AI — from cloud infrastructure to foundation models — can deliver tangible values in one of the most knowledge-intensive functions in insurance sector. This collaboration merges Prudential’s domain expertise with Alibaba Cloud’s trusted capabilities, proving that AI can successfully transition from pilot programs to core business operations. It also sets a compelling benchmark for AI-powered innovation across financial services in the region.”
Before AI Underwriter, it could take days for a preliminary review to indicate what additional information may be required before an application proceeds. Built in close collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, the solution brings together Prudential’s business, underwriting and technology expertise to translate underwriting rules, experience and business needs into a practical AI-enabled tool for real-world use by financial consultants. By helping them receive initial guidance earlier, collect more complete information from customers upfront and reduce administrative back-and-forth, AI Underwriter supports a smoother submission process and ultimately makes protection faster for customers.
Candy Au Yeung, Chief Customer Operations and Health Officer, Prudential Hong Kong Limited, said: “The future of customer experience lies in combining human expertise with intelligent AI. AI Underwriter gives our distribution partners clarity on pre-underwriting outcomes earlier, helps customers secure protection sooner, and enables more consistent decisions with the professional judgement customers expect from Prudential. It also reflects how we are reimagining our operating model: through a forward-deployment engineering approach, our AI, Technology and Project teams work closely with the business to build practical, scalable AI solutions. This has shortened development time to less than three months, a significant improvement in time-to-market compared with traditional development lifecycles.”
AI Underwriter is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s full-stack AI and cloud infrastructure. By harnessing Alibaba's Qwen Models through Model Studio, the solution’s advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine drives precise data ingestion, intent recognition, and sentence-level evidence grounding, delivering over 95% accuracy with hallucination rates below 2%. The solution provides Prudential with a unified, highly scalable foundation built to support their evolving business. AI Underwriter's rapid deployment in under three months was made possible by Alibaba Cloud's Forward-Deployment Engineering (FDE) service model, which embeds expert engineers and purpose-built AI agents directly into Prudential's business and engineering workflows.
AI Underwriter is introduced as the first phase of Prudential’s broader roadmap to enhance underwriting support through AI. In future phases, Prudential plans to expand the service to other sales channels, including bancassurance and brokerage, while making the tool available to its underwriting team to support faster and more consistent review of applications. The knowledge base is also expected to be progressively enhanced with relevant historical underwriting decisions and reinsurers’ underwriting guidelines, enabling the tool to learn from broader underwriting experience and provide more accurate support over time.
AI Underwriter does not replace underwriters’ professional judgement or final underwriting decisions. Final underwriting decisions remain with Prudential’s underwriters after all relevant information has been received and reviewed. By combining insurance expertise with trusted technology partnerships, Prudential aims to contribute to the sustainable development of Hong Kong's AI and insurance ecosystem while ensuring AI is applied safely, ethically and in the best interests of customers.
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About Prudential Hong Kong Limited
Prudential has been serving the people of Hong Kong since 1964. Through Prudential Hong Kong Limited and Prudential General Insurance Hong Kong Limited, the Company provides a range of financial planning services and products, including individual life insurance, investment-linked insurance, retirement solutions, health and medical protection, general insurance, and employee benefits to protect over 1.41 million customers in Hong Kong. Beyond Hong Kong, Prudential serves the Macau community through its branch, offering health insurance and financial solutions to complete its footprint in the Greater Bay Area. Visit www.prudential.com.hk for more information.
About Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is a global leader in full-stack AI+Cloud solutions. It offers a comprehensive suite of flexible, scalable and secure cloud services built on a three-tiered architecture of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). Alibaba Cloud empowers enterprises worldwide with its full-stack AI capabilities, powered by Qwen (Chinese: Qianwen), a family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba. Debuted in 2023, Qwen models are available to global developers via HuggingFace (open-weight) or through API on Model Studio, Alibaba’s one-stop, enterprise-grade AI development platform offering access to the full suite of Qwen foundation models.
