Ready to break the legacy business and technology mold, embrace the change, ignite innovation, and redefine the future of insurance? That was ITI 2025!
Once again, ITI brought together some of the brightest, forward-looking and courageous industry leaders and influencers who discussed, shared, and debated all aspects of the future of insurance for both P&C and L&AH. In fact, L&AH came to the playing field with a strong presence and participation, ready for change and inspired to innovate.
But what was obvious was a vibe across the two days that the industry needs to pick up the pace of change because the value of InsurTech is more important than ever!
Rethink of the Business Operating Model with Transformative Technology Foundation
While Insurtech was the topic of the two days, there is increasing recognition that to truly leverage today’s advanced and innovative technology, we must first rethink the insurance business operating model – something I have written about a lot! It means redefining the business and breaking away from outdated business assumptions that are no longer relevant. As a dear InsurTech Influencer, Lisa Wardlow shared with me…insurance operating models were not actually designed, they were inherited, patched, and protected by tradition and habit.
The legacy operating model construct is layered in technologies with the hope of optimizing. But the result has been inefficient and unprofitable, with employee-constrained operations and a layered, complex technology foundation that has increased costs rather than decreasing them.
I moderated one ITI panel session that included Majesco customers Raymond Perez Brayfield, from Antilles, and Jennifer King, from Boston Mutual Life. Our conversation was focused exactly on this — rethinking the business operating model and technology foundation for the future to empower innovation.
Jen shared with the audience that they found a picture of their current system going live from the 1970’s and they are now using Intelligent Core Suite for L&AH. Raymond discussed their transition from legacy to Intelligent Core for P&C as well – both highlighting the excitement of their teams! They both noted that the embedded analytics, including GenAI, is important to drive operational efficiencies and lower expense ratios, while at the same time having an “assistant” helping them provide excellent service to their customers.
Insurers need to change the economics for loss ratios, expense ratios, risk selection, and risk prevention. It requires rethinking the business operating model and processes to leverage a wide array of amazing technologies, including Cloud, APIs, AI/ML, GenAI, IoT, and more. This will drive operational optimization and lay a foundation for innovation. It is future-focused, based on the reality of the world in which we live, and it represents smart investing, with payoffs now and into the future.
AI and GenAI are Accelerating and REAL
As you walked through the exhibit hall, AI and GenAI wording was prevalent – over 50% had the words AI, with only five booths talking about GenAI. While that seems like a lot, the reality is many are still talking about it, but few are really doing anything substantial with it, given lots of single-point solutions or use cases.
Last year, we were on the main stage where I moderated a panel talking about GenAI and AI and we had the same panel back looking at where we are a year later as an industry with Jim DeMarco from Microsoft, Manish Shah from Majesco and Bob Pick from Tokio Marine. Bob Pick noted that last year was “wait and see” and today must be “test and play” because the pace of adoption and disruption of GenAI and now Agentic AI is so fast that many will not be able to catch up.
The panel conversation highlighted the real business value of next-gen intelligent solutions with embedded GenAI and Agentic AI across the entire value chain and processes that can drive operational optimization and efficiencies with productivity at 10 to 20 times improvement. AI can decipher complex policy details, address policy queries, generate correspondence, offer loss control guidance, propose claims injury categorization and much more. Detailed guidance, assessments, and recommendations are improving decisions.
GenAI automated processing improves productivity, decreases operational costs, and accelerates knowledge acquisition and employee performance. GenAI simplifies the complex, enhances decision-making, provides transactional guidance and optimizes every step. With 50% of industry professionals retiring by 2030, its timely capabilities accelerate onboarding, reskilling, and bending the learning curve for employees. To capitalize, insurers must foster technology literacy and critical thinking, then reshape employee roles from repetitive transactional work to analytical, technical and relationship-oriented skills.
Manish Shah shared that Majesco is already working towards the next major revolution – Agentic AI. Compared to generative AI services, which rely on a chat box and a user asking for the tool to complete a task, an Agentic AI is an autonomous agent that can make its own decisions. These agents are goal-oriented within their defined environments, able to complete their tasks and reach out to the human when they need help, rather than the other way around. The panel discussed the concern about autonomous agents taking over jobs, but highlighted that it improves the overall quality of a team’s work through accuracy and consistency. The human touch is still essential. Agentic AI will be able to read an inbox and process requests, but humans will be available to monitor and guide them. This will shift some from creation tasks to supervisory roles. It empowers an insurer to transform the entire operating model to become more efficient, driving improved profitability and reduced operational costs that, in turn, can improve product pricing and market competitiveness.
Optimism for the Future
A big theme throughout the conference was optimism for the future and the growing importance of the business value of tech being a big differentiator for insurance organizations. The potentially larger investments are recognized as necessary for both P&C and L&AH segments, but there needs to be scrutiny (and ultimately a clear understanding) around how technology will move the business forward under a significantly different, efficient operating model.
The operating model needs to lower expenses and expense ratios, empower business users, attract and retain talent, and elevate customer experiences with consistent and quality information and interactions. Working together, these model outcomes will drive profitability, growth and success.
While most insurers recognize the strategic importance of transformation, only a subset are executing at the level necessary to compete in the next era of insurance. Laggards and Followers risk marginalization in a marketplace increasingly dominated by fast-moving, digitally mature competitors. Without bold corrective action to align strategy with execution, many insurers will miss growth opportunities, experience weakened customer relevance and loyalty and suffer diminished long-term competitiveness and financial viability. Inertia is the real risk for insurers.
The case is stronger than ever for changing how we do business by rethinking our business model and technology foundation to match a new modern era of insurance. Agile transformation, optimization and innovation in insurance is not a future concept but a present-day necessity to remain competitive in the marketplace.
Imagine what next year will be like. What will the future of insurance be?
Game on!
The post Dare to Disrupt: InsurTech Insights 2025 appeared first on Majesco.
