Annually, Celent examines the business priorities, IT budgets, and investments being made by North American life insurance company technology executives. Celent publishes similar reports on EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In December 2023 and January 2024, Celent distributed an online survey to North American life and annuity insurance company technology executives, across both individual and group lines. While the survey was reasonably short, it covered a broad range of topics, including business priorities, IT budgets, investment plans, and GenerativeAI/LLMs. A few findings include:

• Cybersecurity has risen to the top of business priorities followed by digital acceleration and innovation as they plan their 2024 investments. Growth continues to have an influence on their IT spending plans, but cost containment is also a serious consideration, so spending is more controlled than in the past three year
• North American life insurers' spending has dropped to pre-pandemic levels. Maintaining current systems makes up more than half of IT budgets and insurers are focusing on implementing and enhancing investments made over the past few years. Cybersecurity budgets continue to increase
• PAS investments top core system plans, but front end investments have rebounded as insurers look to boost agent efficiency and enhance the user experience. Data and analytics investment plans include significantly enhancing or maintaining existing systems
• North American life insurers are not actively using GenAI/LLMs today, but most are planning their use or have them in development. Use cases are being piloted in internal operations and policyholder servicing.