CEO Voices – an Interview with Mathieu Godart CEO of AXA France

Oct 13, 2026 AI in Insurance, CEO Voices, Data and Finance in Insurance

Mathieu Godart has been Chief Executive Officer of AXA France since December 2025, after leading for two years its P&C division. A graduate of the London Business School, he has built his career within AXA around marketing, distribution, and customer relations before taking the helm of the French entity, representing more than one quarter of the revenues of the AXA Group led by Thomas Buberl.

Recognized for his strategic vision and commitment to innovation and customer simplicity, he is driving the transformation of AXA France's operating model across all business lines: Property & Casualty, Savings, Protection, and Health, in a context of growing systemic risks, with climate change and demographic ageing at the forefront of concerns. He embodies an approach that combines performance, responsibility, and proximity to customers.

AXA France is one of the main AXA Group entities in the world, dedicated to insurance and financial protection. It protects millions of individuals, professionals, and businesses every day across Property & Casualty, Savings, Protection, and Health, against risks related to property, liability, operations, and life events.

A market leader in France with annual revenue of around €30 billion, AXA France relies on an extensive network of over 19,000 distributors, 4,000 partner brokers, and rapidly expanding digital channels.

The company places innovation, simplicity, and trust at the core of its strategy, investing heavily in the modernization of its IT systems, the digitalization of the customer journey, and the deployment of artificial intelligence solutions to enhance speed and quality of service, especially in claims management.

Committed to climate transition and risk prevention, AXA France develops products that strengthen the resilience of individuals and businesses in the face of natural events and new challenges, particularly in cyber and longevity. Under the leadership of Mathieu Godart, AXA France continues an ambitious transformation that combines performance, responsibility, and innovation in the service of its policyholders.

Summary

Mathieu Godart highlights a global transformation underway in the insurance industry, driven by the convergence of data, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies like IoT and quantum computing. These shifts are redefining how insurers assess risk, deliver services, and contribute to societal resilience. The focus is moving from reactive claims management to proactive prevention and adaptation, with technology serving as both a catalyst and a challenge.

Godart stresses the importance of pragmatic implementation, ethical data use, and employee empowerment to ensure meaningful progress. Reflecting AXA France’s strategic direction, he states: “The future should not be a risk.” This conviction underpins a broader industry mission – to build trust, foster inclusion, and ensure insurance remains a stabilizing force in an increasingly uncertain world.

Questions of Marcin Pluta, President of Sollers Consulting,
to Mathieu Godart, CEO of AXA France

Marcin Pluta: What have been the most important technological developments for the insurance sector over the past 25 years, and what has been their impact on AXA France?

Mathieu Godart: Over the past twenty-five years, three major technological developments have marked an essential stage in the evolution of the insurance sector, with a profound impact on our activities at AXA France.

The first, and undoubtedly the most structuring, concerns the growing importance of data. Data has always been the raw material of our business, but the increasing volume of accessible data and our ability to exploit it effectively represent both an opportunity and a challenge. Mastering multiple sources, ensuring data quality, reliability and compliance must allow us to better refine risk understanding, personalize our offers and support, but also to integrate the important aspect of prevention.

Furthermore, digitalization has enabled us – in conjunction with the privileged relationship that clients have with our tied agents – to add an opportunity for interaction and value-added services such as the ability to declare a claim at any time, and to track its progress with simplicity and transparency.

Finally, Artificial Intelligence is experiencing an unprecedented acceleration. Beyond the automation efforts carried out in recent years, current perspectives are changing dimension. At this stage, we are focusing on a limited but impactful number of use cases, such as an AI-powered motor pricing engine, a conversational tool to interact with our underwriting document databases for our tied agents and their teams, or a Next Best Offer tool embedded in our CRM.

Today, we are ready to scale AI across the whole value chain!

But this use of Artificial Intelligence cannot take place without all the tedious but necessary work mentioned regarding data.

This is why we launched a dedicated program at AXA France in 2024, to accelerate this transformation by deploying a decentralized organization to foster innovation, training our employees, and modernizing our technological foundations to fully leverage Artificial Intelligence now and in the future.

Marcin Pluta: Current challenges: The world is currently facing numerous geopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Which do you consider the most important from the point of view of AXA France? How do you address them?

Mathieu Godart: For more than ten years, through the Future Risks Report, we have surveyed experts and the general public on their perception of the risks the world is exposed to. Climate risk, cyber risk and social risks consistently appear in the top 3. The steady increase in natural disasters, such as floods or fires, as well as the multiplication of cyberattacks, bear witness to this reality.

At AXA France, we provide concrete responses to these challenges, by integrating prevention, anticipation, and innovation into our daily actions.

As an illustration, we have developed Clim’Agir, a crisis response mechanism dedicated to climate events, which enables us to send alerts and prevention advice by SMS (7 million alerts in 2025) to our policyholders before a climate event. Our tied agents, local partners, also play an essential role: every year they visit many companies to recommend the implementation of prevention plans and can rely on our expert teams. We also capitalize on technology with, for example, Altitude, a tool developed by AXA Climate, which enables companies to assess their exposure to various natural risks across their facilities — not only at present, but also in the future — based on the different scenarios established by the IPCC . Finally, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of claims, the use of reused parts in more than 22% of our motor claims, or the Green Guarantee where we cover 50% of the costs related to improving the energy performance of a damaged home, are other forms of response.

Cyber risk management for our clients occupies a strategic place in our action plan. We have redesigned our cyber offer to integrate a vulnerability test and enable our policyholders to take preventive measures linked to the identified weaknesses. We also offer a training program aimed at raising team awareness of best practices.

Finally, our commitment goes well beyond risk management. AXA France places inclusion and local anchoring at the heart of its mission.

In a context marked by social fragmentation, we are multiplying initiatives to make our solutions accessible to all. We adapt our products, reduce deposits at subscription, and launch new offers addressing the societal challenges we closely monitor, responding with concrete solutions at the heart of our insurance expertise.

Our commitment is reflected in innovative guarantees designed to tackle pressing social issues. For instance, we have integrated comprehensive protections against domestic violence across our entire product range, notably emergency rehousing guarantees in our Home Insurance policies, as well as dedicated coverage in our Group Health and Protection offerings. We are also launching new support programs for single-parent families through our Accidents of Life guarantee, available since the start of the school year, providing assistance with home care, psychological support, and educational tutoring for children, within 12 months following the separation.

Our approach is pragmatic: we select high value-added use cases, ensuring that we have the necessary infrastructures. 

Marcin Pluta: The next 25 years: What changes will have the greatest impact on the insurance sector in the future? What do you expect for the activities of AXA France? What role will technological developments such as AI, IoT, quantum computers play?

Mathieu Godart: The next twenty-five years will be marked by a profound technological transformation. Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and, in a more distant perspective, quantum computers, will shape the future of insurance, particularly in data processing and risk assessment.

AI, in particular, will be an important driver of transformation, in favor of the growth of our business, our quality of service, our technical excellence and our operational efficiency. Our approach is pragmatic: we select high value-added use cases, ensuring that we have the necessary infrastructures. Since 2023, we have launched AXA Secure GPT, a platform dedicated to our 11,000 employees and our distribution networks, to familiarize them with these tools. We are also deploying Microsoft Copilot across all our employees, integrated seamlessly into their work environment, to enhance productivity and support daily tasks. We support this transition with training, regular events such as the Data & AI Day, and the creation of a library of ready-to-use prompts to simplify their use. From an HR perspective, we engaged on a regular basis with our employees representatives to share in full transparency our various initiatives. It is critical for us to listen to their questions and answer them. This transformation is part of a cultural shift, so that every employee becomes an actor in this revolution. Our employees must and will remain at the center of this transformation.

As for IoT, concepts already exist but struggle to scale up. Among the major challenges to be met, it is necessary to reassure users about the use of collected data, to find the right integration within our offer, and to build a relevant economic equation for both client and insurer.

AI, in particular, will be an important driver of transformation, in favor of our quality of service, our technical excellence and our operational efficiency.

Marcin Pluta: At the intersection of changing customer habits, the emergence of new complex risks and growing insurability challenges, in a context of technological revolution largely driven by artificial intelligence, how do you see the evolution of the role of the insurer? And concretely, how is AXA preparing to embody this new role?

Mathieu Godart: Faced with a rapidly changing environment, insurance – as it always has – must continue to evolve to fully play its role of protection while being a lever of trust for the future. For 40 years, at AXA, we have continuously reinvented our business to respond to major global upheavals. The very nature of our activity has profoundly changed: beyond claims management, we now focus on prevention, adaptation and resilience. This shift embodies our transition from payer to partner, a transformation made possible by the essential role of our tied agents, who are at the frontline of customer relationships and instrumental in delivering this new advisory approach.

We must further integrate prevention into our advisory approach, find ways to help our policyholders take action, and create a favorable environment by mobilizing all public and private actors. Our tied agents are key partners in this mission, enabling us to translate this vision into concrete support for our customers and to encourage coalitions of stakeholders at the local level within the communities where they have long been embedded.

Marcin Pluta: AXA France has integrated a comprehensive approach to societal challenges into its core offerings: protections against domestic violence across all product lines, anti-bullying guarantees, and now, through our Accidents of Life guarantee, dedicated support programs for single-parent families — including home care assistance, psychological support, and educational tutoring. In your opinion, does this constellation of initiatives foreshadow a lasting broadening of the societal role of private insurance in France and particularly of AXA, beyond its traditional missions of coverage and compensation? Do you believe this role will strengthen in the years to come in response to evolving societal expectations?

Mathieu Godart: This is, in any case, the positioning of AXA as a Group, whose objective is to protect populations against poorly addressed risks to which they may be exposed, domestic violence, school bullying, lack of support for caregivers, and vulnerabilities affecting single-parent families. These commitments are deeply embedded in AXA's DNA since Claude Bébéar's founding vision, now embodied by Thomas Buberl: the conviction that insurers have a legitimate and meaningful role to play in addressing societal challenges.

We have the conviction that it can be achieved not by pretending to solve them alone, but by acting where we are most relevant and equipped, as insurers, to deliver concrete solutions and contribute meaningfully to the collective effort.

Insurers are legitimate in doing so. As part of our initiative to combat domestic violence, a study indicated that 83% of respondents believe that this "domestic violence" clause should become a standard in the industry, showing both the interest in and the need for these guarantees. We are committed to continuing down this path, deepening our societal engagement across all our business lines. If we can position ourselves as providers of solutions that address genuine social needs, not just as risk managers, but as responsible actors contributing to a more resilient society, then everyone wins: our customers, our employees, the companies we partner with, and society as a whole. That would be a true source of pride for all of us.

[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change