We entered January with an ambitious goal: to establish ourselves as the go-to technology partner for leading brokers and carriers in the London market.
Happily, as the nights grow long and the temperature falls, we enter the festive period with our technology firmly embedded in some of the market’s most forward-thinking companies.
It’s been a fantastic year for the team. So, as we close on this year of rapid expansion, growing partnerships and new adventures, we’re allowing ourselves to reminisce over the biggest achievements of the past 12 months.
Warm welcomes to new joiners
We say this every year, but this really was the biggest year yet for new starters at Artificial.
We’ve welcomed talent across every part of the business this year: from engineers and designers to product managers and legal experts. Each new team member brings unique skills, fresh perspectives, and a shared commitment to building the future of specialty insurance.
Welcome to our 30 fantastic new team members:
Sergei Tatarinov - Design Contractor
Jon Lay - VP Design
Pavlo Vodop’Yan - Staff Engineer
Jay Haley - Lead Engineering Manager
Isaac Lee - AI Engineering Intern
Nayef Shkeir - Junior AI Engineer
Liam Field - Technical Writer
Annie Casey - Solutions Engineer
Sam Bass - Solutions Engineer
Jonas Söderholm - Staff Engineer
James McArdle - Solutions Engineer
Rebecca Murta - Solutions Engineer
Meg Atkinson - Head of Legal
James Elliott - Client Success Manager
Jamie Lovelace - Design Engineer
Ben Orchard - Haskell Engineer
Harry Roscoe - Haskell Engineer
Dan Brooks - Haskell Engineer
Flavio Gashi - Finance Manager
Sergei Winitzki - Haskell Engineer
Fedo Roffi - Frontend Engineer
Pablo Bollansée - Haskell Engineer
Sajjad Abedi - Design Engineer
Abby Sassel - Product Engineer
Gosha Tcherednitchenko - Design Contractor
Jaden Tham - Solutions Engineer
Elizabeth Awosode - Solutions Engineer
Lawrence Weetman - Product Manager
Believe it or not, we’re still hiring! To join our growing team, visit our careers page now and find the right role for you.
Launching Smart Placement for brokers
Perhaps the most impactful product in Artificial’s history, the creation and launch of Smart Placement for brokers brought unforeseen opportunities to the business in 2025.
Smart Placement was developed in partnership with our clients and takes broker tooling to the next level with a new and more powerful way to transform digital placement strategy.
The product enables better outcomes for the insured, thanks to smoother and faster placements and reduced leakage with quick and consistent access to capacity. The platform is highly configurable and can be tailored to brokers’ unique placement strategies.
Early implementation data shows some brokers enjoying 100% premium uplift in a digital facility created with Artificial, alongside an 80% reduction in admin costs.
It’s true that while Smart Placement has been revolutionary for our clients, it can only exist within a wider landscape that is open to digitisation. Broking in the London market has taken huge strides this year, and we wanted to share what we’ve been up to with some of our clients as part of that. We therefore closed out the year with our broking white paper, available here.
A plethora of partnerships
Of course, we wouldn’t have been able to grow so much in 2025 without our clients.
Although we can’t mention all of our new partners (yet), we were delighted to announce a major collaboration with McGill and Partners in October. Together, we are creating a single integrated digital platform where brokers can manage the full placement lifecycle, from submission to bind, and streamline downstream processing. The solution is currently in the process of a phased global rollout, starting with all UK and Europe specialty areas.
In July, we announced the creation of Augmented Underwriting MGA. The new MGA marries the market and underwriting expertise of the team, led by Dan Prince, with Artificial’s technology. What follows is a superior offering for brokers and underwriters who want to trade without the complexity of building in-house Smart Follow vehicles.
On top of some fantastic clients, we announced our integration with Addresscloud in October, which will give our underwriting and broking partners access to more granular data and more accurate decisions for US property.
Watch this space for more partnership news coming soon.
An Artificial podcast (with an award-winning host)
What does the world need more of? Podcasts, obviously.
We launched our new show, Insurance Technology: Fact or Fiction? in April with the aim of debunking the industry myths we so often hear in conversations around the market.
Hosted by the award-winning Young Insurance Woman of the Year Georgie Simister, each episode tackles a different myth with an expert guest from across the industry. So far, Georgie has examined a wide range of topics, including if insurtech is just a fad (it’s not) to why claims isn’t actually boring (trust us), with many interesting insights along the way.
Listen to Insurance Technology: Fact or Fiction? on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, and look out for more great guests starting from January.
Let me entertain you
From London to New York and back again, this year has played host to some great events and conferences.
In April, our Chief Growth Officer Ed Howkins took to the stage at Instech’s Growth of Enhanced underwriting with Clyde Bernstein at Aon and Hayley Spink at Chaucer to explore how to build a smart digital proposition tailored to your business (hint: work with us).
In June, we visited the Big Apple for Insurtech Insights to learn more about the great work happening in E&S insurance. Later that month, Ed discussed how we built our Smart Follow underwriting collaboration with Apollo’s Farris Salah at an event on London’s digital wave.
The rise of Smart Follow was one of the earliest signs of the digitisation drive in the London market. Terms like this and ‘Smart Lead’ may have become common parlance, but we think there’s much more to enhanced underwriting than that. You can read more in the white paper here.
We’d be remiss to forget our world-class engineers, some of whom visited Cadiz for the annual Lambda World Conference.
It was also a busy year for our Data Team, who showcased our Agentic AI capabilities at the Google Summit in July and an Agentic AI Instech conference in November to launch our Agentic innovation arm, AgLabs.
And finally, our Co-CEO David King rounded off conference season with a fantastic keynote speech on AI in Underwriting at the London Market Conference - read his speech here.
Don’t look down
Some of the bravest members of the Artificial team took to the top of the Lloyd’s building for their annual charity abseil in July. To varying levels of enjoyment, Caitlin, Georgie and Andy managed to make it down and raised an enormous £3,355 for Mind in the process!
Well done to our intrepid team of abseilers 👏🏼
Taking our coffee obsession to another level
On perhaps the coldest day of the year, we took to the Lloyd’s coffee cart to hand out the new Artificial blend to the London insurance market.
Over 1,000 coffees were given out, many fruitful conversations were had, and the bar was set for another year of caffeine addiction.
Since the start of the year, we estimate that over 5,000 cups of Artificial blend coffee have been consumed in our London office alone. We even added a logo printer to the set up.
With more team members joining soon, who knows how many cups we’ll get through in 2026?
Punderful traditions
Did you know you can do a lot of silly things with the word ‘Artificial?’ Writing puns takes up an inordinate amount of time for our team, but it makes us happy.
For example, we couldn’t go through the whole year without mentioning our Star Pet, Lola, who won this year’s Pawtificial Crufts competition for being an outstanding member of the community (and just a very good girl). Well done to Lola, proudly looked after by our Head of Transformation, Dips.
Then, to celebrate the first summer in our new office, we hosted Bar-b-ficial by bringing together our London office on our sunny terrace.
And a special shout-out goes to Partyficial, our annual offsite where we bring together the whole team from across Europe and the UK. This year we enjoyed go-karting (Kartificial) and fairground games before a 12th birthday-style soirée.
What’s to come in 2026?
It would be impossible to mention everything that went on in 2025. We already have a few surprises up our sleeves for the next few months, so watch this space.
If you’d like to join the Artificial team, contribute some puns, or work with our mostly serious team, get in touch.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at Artificial! 🎄