How AXA Switzerland Uses BigQuery and Vertex AI to Cut Query Times by 95%

AXA Switzerland insures more than 40% of Swiss companies and has served the country for over 140 years, offering car, liability, health, life, and pension products. When the insurer’s leadership recognized in 2021 that its analog operating model was falling behind customer expectations and competitive demands, it made a decisive bet on cloud technology — becoming the first AXA subsidiary globally to move entirely to the cloud.

Before the transformation, the infrastructure was built for reporting rather than real-time decision-making. Complex analytical queries could run for an entire weekend, siloed systems blocked cross-functional insights, and customer-facing processes required structured inputs that many customers found cumbersome. The data estate was fragmented, making it nearly impossible to combine CRM, ERP, e-commerce, and operational data in a single view.

AXA Switzerland migrated its data lake to Google Cloud in 2021 and built a unified analytics foundation on BigQuery. This allowed the organization to consolidate enterprise data sources — CRM, ERP, e-commerce, and operational systems — into one platform. The team then layered machine learning workloads on Vertex AI, deployed Cloud Run for serverless applications, and integrated Dialogflow for voice interfaces. The current phase involves exploring generative AI through Gemini, with an assistant-first policy that keeps AI augmenting human specialists rather than directly replacing customer interactions.

The results are measurable across the business. Query and processing times fell by more than 95% — what once consumed a full weekend now completes in seconds or minutes. Medical document triage that required 25 minutes of specialist time now runs in seconds with high accuracy. A fraud detection ruleset deployed in its first week identified a 120,000 Swiss franc false claim, and the Smart Data program as a whole generated a high double-digit million Swiss franc profit improvement. More than 100 Google Cloud projects are now live in production across all business lines.

The shift has fundamentally changed how the IT function operates at AXA Switzerland. Rather than receiving requirements from the business and executing them, the technology team now initiates innovation sprints and brings new capabilities to business stakeholders. The company is actively exploring agentic AI, geospatial underwriting using satellite data, and multimodal AI across text, voice, and imagery — positioning itself at the frontier of what is technically possible in European insurance.