Allianz Retire+ launches AI assistant for advisers
Tue, 16th Jun 2026 (Today)
V2 AI and Anthropic have developed an AI assistant for Allianz Retire+, designed for financial advisers using the insurer's retirement income products.
The assistant, known as Ada, uses Anthropic's Claude model through AWS Bedrock. It is intended to help advisers, paraplanners and other financial services users navigate Allianz Guaranteed Income for Life, or AGILE, by answering questions and drawing on approved product documentation and internal calculation tools.
The project comes as Anthropic expands in Australia and New Zealand and seeks a larger role in regulated sectors. V2 AI, an Asia-Pacific data and AI consultancy, is working with a range of Australian businesses in industries where compliance and audit requirements can slow software deployment.
Ada targets a time-consuming part of financial advice: understanding and comparing retirement income products and quickly finding the right source material. The companies say the assistant can calculate income rates using user inputs and internal tools, enrich responses with calculator data, and retrieve information from approved documents to provide immediate answers to detailed product questions.
Allianz Retire+ says this should reduce friction in early adviser engagement and cut some of the manual work involved in handling product queries. The insurer also positions the tool as a way to provide more consistent and compliant support to advisers dealing with retirement income planning.
David Kane, Chief Executive Officer of Allianz Retire+, said the assistant was built around usability and control.
"We've listened to advisers and recognised that for them to effectively solve for their clients' retirement needs, they first need a frictionless way to master the tools at their disposal. Ada allows advisers to ask questions and receive robust answers within seconds, freeing up their time to focus on building better retirements for their clients," Kane said.
Regulated sectors
Beyond financial services, V2 AI is applying Anthropic's models in energy and government work. In energy, the consultancy is building grid optimisation agents, customer billing optimisation tools and anomaly detection systems. In government, it is working on mainframe modernisation based on AI agents and regulatory knowledge assistants for public administration.
Those projects indicate where demand for generative AI is growing in Australia: sectors with heavy documentation, formal decision processes and a need for traceability. Businesses in those areas have been more cautious than consumer-facing companies because errors, weak controls or poor record-keeping can carry financial and regulatory consequences.
V2 AI says its work in these sectors relies on guardrails such as hallucination detection, human review and audit trails that can stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Successful deployment also depends as much on governance, legal review and operating structures as on the underlying model.
Craig Howe, Founder and CEO of V2 AI, linked the Allianz Retire+ project to a broader push to bring Anthropic's software into Australian organisations.
"Partnering with Anthropic at this pivotal moment allows us to bring world-class trusted AI capabilities to Australian organisations like Allianz and deliver significant business outcomes," Howe said.
The consultancy works across Anthropic's wider product set, including Claude through AWS Bedrock, Claude Code, the Claude API platform and Claude Teams for company-wide use. That reflects a wider market shift in which consultancies are moving beyond standalone chatbots and trying to embed language models into workflows, technical systems and internal operating processes.
V2 AI was founded in 2023 and operates in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur. It has backing from Columbia Capital through a USD $30 million Series A investment.
Howe said the partnership with Anthropic was intended to support a broader rollout of AI systems across Australian and Asia-Pacific organisations.
"Through our partnership with Anthropic, we aim to continue harnessing Claude to deliver consistent, high-quality solutions that help our customers not just adopt AI faster, but grow faster as a result. We believe this will establish a new standard for trusted, responsible and outcome-driven AI, supporting businesses across Australia and the broader APAC region to achieve significant business outcomes," Howe said.