Powered by Artificial: How Apollo turned follow capacity into a competitive advantage
Working with Artificial, Apollo has turned Smart Follow from a concept into a live underwriting model operating across multiple facilities. For years, the market has treated scale and control as competing priorities. Smart Follow was built to challenge that assumption.
Today, the award-winning model is operating across live facilities, where re-keying has been removed, referral volumes are declining through continuous rule refinement, and acquisition costs sit below traditional delegated authority structures.
About Apollo
Apollo is an insurer and reinsurer operating across multiple classes and territories. Follow capacity plays an important role in its underwriting strategy, helping the business deploy capital while maintaining underwriting discipline, visibility, and control across a diverse portfolio.
As submission volumes increased, Apollo needed a follow model that could write more business without expanding underwriting headcount, while retaining visibility, control and real-time insight into portfolio performance.
Challenge
The follow market has lived with a blunt trade-off for years. Broker facilities create reach, but can dilute underwriting control, data quality, and portfolio visibility. Direct follow keeps control closer to the carrier but makes scale harder because underwriters are pulled into reviewing risks one by one.
Apollo wanted to move past that trade-off. Follow capacity was central to how the business wanted to deploy capital, but growth could not come at the expense of underwriting authority or real-time portfolio insight.
The challenge was clear: make follow capacity scalable whilst maintaining discipline. That meant building a model that could capture data cleanly at entry, apply Apollo’s underwriting logic before friction reached the underwriter, and use live trading feedback to sharpen decisions over time.
Solution
Artificial puts Apollo’s underwriting logic where it matters: at the point risk enters the workflow. That is the difference between digitising a process and building a carrier product.
Data is structured and validated at source. Appetite, preference, and portfolio tolerance are applied before the risk reaches the underwriter. Risks that fit the agreed parameters can move forward, and risks that fall outside appetite are referred with the relevant information already assembled.
That changes the job underwriters are being asked to do. They are not there to clean up data or process every exception manually. They are there to apply judgement where it actually changes the outcome.
Smart Follow was designed around the way Apollo wanted follow capacity to operate as a carrier. Rather than building rules around a theoretical process, the model has been shaped through live use, with underwriting teams able to refine how risks are assessed, referred, and prioritised as the portfolio evolves.
As more business moves through the model, the data becomes more useful, and the rules become more precise. That means clearer portfolio insight and a better use of underwriting resource. The objective is not to remove human involvement from the process. It is to ensure underwriters are spending their time where they add the most value.
Results
Smart Follow is now live across two Smart Facilities, both with US coverholders.
On these facilities , re-keying has been removed. Data is ingested once and reused across downstream outputs. Referral volumes have declined by approximately 50%, and when referrals do occur, they are resolved faster because the data is already structured and prioritised.
The model has also provided a financial benefit as acquisition costs are lower than traditional delegated authority structures.
For Apollo, the result is a more controlled and repeatable way to grow follow capacity. For Artificial, it demonstrates that scale does not have to come at the expense of underwriting control, portfolio visibility, or appetite discipline.
In September 2026, the two teams won the Smart Follow Initiative of the Year award at the Insider Honours in recognition of the partnership.
We are delighted to continue our collaboration with Artificial. They have been a true partner in every sense, and together, we have built differentiating insurance products. The partnership has accelerated our goal of digitising insurance and delivering augmented underwriting at scale. We are excited about the opportunities Smart Follow creates and the role it will continue to play in how we deploy capacity.
Our work with Apollo on Smart Follow began in 2023, and from the outset it was clear this needed to be a genuine partnership, not just a technology implementation. Apollo had a strong view on how it wanted to deploy follow capacity as a carrier, and our role was to help shape a model that could operate reliably in day-to-day trading. Those decisions were tested in live use and refined around how the business actually behaved. That was critical in turning Smart Follow into a carrier product, rather than a set of features.
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