Shinhan Life launches LICO 2.0, with AI now powering 7 in 10 insurance plan designs

Shinhan Life is accelerating its AI transformation on the sales floor by upgrading its generative AI-based insurance plan design system.

The insurer announced Friday that it has launched LICO 2.0, an upgraded version of its AI-powered plan design system LICO — short for Life Copilot.

LICO was the first natural-language plan design system in the domestic insurance industry when Shinhan Life introduced it in February. Agents enter customer information and coverage conditions in conversational language, and the generative AI analyzes the input, suggests a design direction tailored to the customer's needs, and supports the creation of a plan proposal.

The latest upgrade focuses on raising the level of automation in product design work on the sales floor. AI now supports the entire design process in real time, allowing agents to instantly check product recommendations, coverage analyses and revised plan proposals even in the middle of a customer consultation.

Processing speed and response quality have also improved. LICO 2.0 generates plan recommendations about 35 percent faster than the previous version. Frequently used functions — such as adding riders or changing coverage amounts — can now be handled with a single button tap, reducing the steps required to type a request and wait for the AI to interpret it.

The system also responds quickly when customer information or product conditions change, or when adjustments arise during premium calculation or underwriting. The company said the streamlined controls allow agents to spend more time explaining products to customers.

Field adoption has surged since the upgrade. The share of plan designs processed through LICO expanded to 13 times the level of the previous month. About 70 percent of all plan designs now go through LICO's AI support, with an average of roughly 11,000 plans generated per day.

Shinhan Life plans to gradually extend LICO's scope beyond plan design to cover the full range of sales activities. The company said it intends to develop the system into an "AI partner" for agents' day-to-day work by expanding its application to consultation preparation, information retrieval and broader sales support.

"We have upgraded the system to reduce the burden of repetitive tasks so that agents can pay closer attention to customers' coverage needs and explain them more thoroughly," a Shinhan Life official said. "We will continue to raise the quality of plan design and consultation."

Meanwhile, Shinhan Life had been laying the groundwork for generative AI adoption ahead of LICO's launch. Starting in October 2024, the company ran a knowledge-base construction project to convert and structure more than 20,000 types of foundational insurance documents — including policy terms, calculation manuals and sales guidelines — into digital data, completing the effort in September last year. At the time, the company said it would use that foundation to introduce an AI agent capable of significantly shortening the new-contract process from plan design through policy approval.