Pricing is one of the most consequential functions in insurance — and one of the least visible. Claims get the headlines. Underwriting gets the scrutiny. But pricing sits quietly underneath both, shaping profitability across millions of policies through assumptions that can go stale faster than anyone realizes. 

For most carriers, the mechanics of pricing haven’t kept pace with how quickly the world is changing. A rate change approved today might not be live in the market for weeks or months, trapped behind policy administration release cycles that were never designed for the kind of volatility the industry is now dealing with — social inflation, rising repair costs, tariff pressure, and catastrophe losses that keep defying historical patterns. 

Kumarappan Sundaram has spent years working through these problems with P&C carriers as a Managing Director at PwC. He brings a technology practitioner’s perspective to a function that often gets treated as a back-office infrastructure problem rather than a strategic capability. He’s measured about where AI fits — distinguishing what is already delivering clear value from what remains genuinely unproven — and direct about the sequencing mistakes carriers make when they try to modernize pricing before the foundation is in place.  

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