Allianz to Cut Up to 1,800 Jobs in Travel Insurance Unit, Blames AI

German insurance giant Allianz announced that its subsidiary Allianz Partners will cut between 1,500 and 1,800 jobs across Europe over the next 12 to 18 months. CEO Tomas Kunzmann told employees directly during an internal meeting in Munich that the cuts are being driven by the growing automation of customer service through artificial intelligence.

Allianz Partners is the part of the Allianz insurance group responsible for, among other things, travel insurance, assistance services and part of the claims-handling process. These are precisely the areas - high-volume phone support, standard customer inquiries, straightforward claims - that are easiest to automate with AI systems capable of holding a conversation, classifying a request and issuing a decision without human involvement.

What the CEO said

Kunzmann did not mince words during the meeting in Munich. He acknowledged that the company has spent six months in talks with employee representatives in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, and that a voluntary departure program has already started in several of those countries. He also assured that employees leaving the company would be treated fairly.

This could have happened to any of us at some point - Tomas Kunzmann, CEO of Allianz Partners

The company also noted that its review of technology's impact on employment will extend to roles that today still rely heavily on manual work and repetitive processes. That is a signal that this year's 1,500-1,800 positions may not be the last wave of cuts tied to the rollout of AI across the group.

Not the industry's first such move

Allianz Partners already announced in June 2025 that it would cut 650 jobs in its UK insurance segment. The current decision, however, is far larger in scale and is the first time the company has so explicitly tied a specific number of eliminated positions to AI systems across all of Europe, rather than in a single country.

The insurance and financial sector has for months been among the leaders in customer service automation, alongside telecoms and banks. Repetitive, standardized processes such as call center work or simple claims are exactly the kind of task that language models and voice systems can now handle more cheaply and quickly than a team of human agents.

A gap with the official narrative

Allianz Partners' decision comes at a time when some Silicon Valley tech leaders have begun softening their earlier alarming predictions of mass layoffs caused by AI, arguing that the labor market is proving more resilient than expected. The reality in the financial services sector tells a different story - concrete job cuts numbering in the thousands, explained directly as a result of AI adoption rather than couched in euphemisms like "restructuring" or "cost optimization".

For Polish readers, it's worth noting that Allianz also operates in Poland, though the current announcement concerns the Allianz Partners segment in Western Europe rather than the Polish branch directly. Still, the scale and bluntness of the CEO's statement point to the direction large financial organizations are heading, regardless of the country in which they operate.

What's next

Final decisions on the number and location of the eliminated positions are expected once consultations with works councils in individual countries are complete. Allianz Partners has not yet released a timeline for rolling out the new AI systems or named the technology vendors it is using to automate customer service and claims handling.

Sources: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com), Insurance Journal (insurancejournal.com), Tech Startups (techstartups.com)