AI in action: Stories of how enterprises are transforming and modernizing

Here’s the secret to success in today’s competitive business world: using advanced expertise and deep data to solve real challenges, make smarter decisions and create lasting value. Generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) are paving the way for this evolution.

AI practitioners and industry leaders discussed these trends, shared best practices, and provided real-world use cases during EXL’s recent virtual event, “AI in Action: Driving the Shift to Scalable AI.”

“AI is no longer just a tool,” said Vishal Chhibbar, chief growth officer at EXL. “It’s a driver of transformation.”

Accelerating modernization

As an example of this transformative potential, EXL demonstrated Code Harbor, its generative AI (genAI)-powered code migration tool. Code Harbor automates current-state assessment, code transformation and optimization, as well as code testing and validation by relying on task-specific, finely tuned AI agents.

“This solution is designed to accelerate platform modernization, streamline workflow assessment and enable data discovery, helping organizations drive efficiency, scalability and compliance,” said Swati Malhotra, AI solutions leader at EXL.

Built on top of EXLerate.AI, EXL’s AI orchestration platform, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Code Harbor eliminates redundant code and optimizes performance, reducing manual assessment, conversion and testing effort by 60% to 80%. Instead of performing line-by-line migrations, it analyzes and understands the business context of code, increasing efficiency. And its modular architecture distributes tasks across multiple agents in parallel, increasing the speed and scalability of migrations.

“Code Harbor provides a comprehensive solution for customers for code diagnosis, code conversion, testing and code optimization,” said Sujit Singh, partner solutions architect at AWS. “This tool provides a pathway for organizations to modernize their legacy technology stack through modern programming languages.”

The virtual event also highlighted EXL’s Insurance LLM, a purpose-built solution for claims adjudication and underwriting, and EXLerate.AI, which combines AI agents and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) to manage and automate complex business workflows.

“The EXLerate.AI platform is a modular, cloud-agnostic architecture with embedded AI agents so that clients can quickly scale AI across their business, in cloud and hybrid environments,” said Wyatt Bennett, AI platform product lead at EXL.

AI’s strategic foundations

In a panel discussion during the event titled “Staying Ahead in the Age of AI: Practical Lessons from Visionary Leaders,” attendees learned how genAI is reshaping various industries.

In commercial insurance, most carriers are aware of genAI’s transformative potential and are already experimenting with it, said Su Fen Lim, senior vice president at Tokio Marine Kiln.

“We should expect this trend to transition to more strategic foundations on embedding AI,” Lim said.

Underwriting is a key target area, with AI being used to improve data ingestion, risk triaging and portfolio optimization. In claims and operations, insurers are applying AI to fraud detection, loss summarization and automation of large-scale document processing.

For Gareth Hemming, chief distribution officer for UK retail business at Hiscox, AI is currently streamlining the underwriting process in retail and high-net-worth home insurance, with the potential to provide more value to long-term clients.

“The interesting development here is how you turn AI into something that helps you deliver an even better service for the customers that you do want, not just help you deal with the ones you don’t want quickly,” Hemming said.

Sumana De Majumdar, global head of channel analytics at HSBC, noted that AI and machine learning have played a role in fraud detection, risk assessment, and transaction monitoring at the bank for more than a decade. HSBC is now cautiously exploring genAI for new use cases, such as summarizing documentation and generating marketing materials, while ensuring that humans and AI always work together to mitigate bias and support contextual, ethical decision making.

“AI lends itself to immense processing power, but we always couple it with expert human judgment,” De Majumdar said.

Monica Collings, chair and non-executive director at multiple energy and infrastructure organizations, highlighted the rising demand for electricity, the shift towards consumer-generated power and “skyrocketing” debt caused by the energy crisis. AI can help organizations adapt to these shifts.

“Where AI has a very big role to play is not only helping us manage all of that data, but actually predicting and pre-empting what accounts might be in distress, and what we might need to do about it,” Collings said.

Meaningful transformation

As generative and agentic AI become more advanced, organizations are using them to modernize legacy systems, streamline operations and enhance decision-making. With the right expertise and data, AI can drive meaningful transformation across industries.

To learn more about what generative and agentic AI can do for your business, visit exlservice.com.