Somewhere right now, two competing carriers are running the same language models, from the same vendors, on the same cloud, tuned by the same consultants. Both executive teams describe this as a competitive advantage.
It cannot be true for both of them. It is probably not true for either.
Insurance adopted generative AI faster than any technology in its history. Two-thirds of North American carriers now run it in production, per Celent's latest insurance industry survey, up from fewer than one in 10 three years ago. Yet in that same survey, only 3% say they are getting the value they expected. I argued in these pages last year that most insurance AI strategies would fail. I would sharpen that now: most of them are succeeding at the wrong thing.
The Uncomfortable Part
Here is the uncomfortable part. Advantage never lives in technology everyone can buy. When every carrier has the same models summarizing the same documents and drafting the same emails, the gains are real, and they cancel out. We have run this experiment before. A website was a strategy in 1999. A mobile app was a strategy in 2012. Each became plumbing within five years, and the winners were decided by what they built on top of it. AI inside the building is on the same clock, and this clock runs faster.
There is a simple test for whether an AI program is compounding or just converging: ask what your customer has noticed. For most carriers, the honest answer is nothing. Nearly every production deployment in the industry is employee-facing. In the same survey, not one insurer runs AI strictly for the customer. The claims process got faster on the inside. The customer still meets the same forms, the same hold music, the same "please allow 7 to 10 business days." We have taken the most human-facing technology ever built and pointed it at everything except the humans.
Where the Real Battle Lies
I argued last year that the real competitive battle is in the experience layer, the place where a client and their financial professional actually meet your company. A year of building on that idea has hardened it into something stronger. The transaction was never the product. Any carrier can process a withdrawal. What surrounds that withdrawal, the tax it triggers, the guarantee it quietly reduces, the conversation it should have started, is where a customer decides what your company is. AI is the first technology that can deliver that surrounding intelligence at scale, to every customer, on every transaction. Which is exactly why the layer it lives in is the one worth owning.
How a carrier builds and owns that layer is the strategy we are executing at Security Benefit, so I will keep the blueprint to myself. But the reasoning behind it fits in one question, and the question is free.
Sometime next year, one of your customers will ask a question about their money. Some intelligence will answer it. Maybe yours. Maybe your distributor's. Maybe a general-purpose model that has never heard of you. The carriers that matter in five years will be the ones that decided, on purpose, whose intelligence answers. That decision is still open. It will not be open long.
