Every major insurer has an AI strategy. Most of them will fail. Not because the technology isn't ready — it is. Not because the use cases don't exist — they do. The strategies will fail because organizations treat AI as a point solution rather than a platform, and they underestimate how fundamentally it demands a different operating model.
I spoke about this at ONUG (Open Networking User Group) last fall under the title "Beating the 4%: Why AI Fails." The thesis is straightforward: the vast majority of enterprise AI initiatives stall at the pilot stage, not because of technical limitations, but because of misalignment between technology investments and business operating models. Insurance, with its complex distribution relationships and legacy infrastructure, is particularly exposed to this failure mode. The question for carriers isn't whether to adopt AI. It's whether they have the architecture — organizational and technical — to make it stick.
Building the Right Foundation
The organizations that succeed with AI don't start with models; they start with alignment. Before any model goes into production, the business objective has to be clear, the data must be trustworthy, and the teams have to understand what the tool is solving and why. That sequencing matters more than the technology itself.
A consistent pattern across successful AI programs is centralized governance, a single framework through which development and deployment are coordinated. This isn't bureaucracy. It's how you prevent fragmentation. Without it, you get dozens of disconnected pilots, inconsistent data practices, and no coherent path to scale. With it, you build institutional muscle: teams that know how to evaluate, deploy, and improve AI solutions within a common framework.
Early applications often show up in operational improvements – streamlining workflows or improving access to knowledge — but those are table stakes. They're the foundation, not the destination.
Owning the Experience Layer
The real competitive battle in insurance isn't being fought in the back office. It's being fought in the experience layer — the digital surface where financial professionals and clients actually interact with your products and your brand. Carriers that own that layer will win. Those that cede it to distributors, aggregators, or fintechs will spend the next decade competing on price alone.
The real opportunity lies here: embedding AI directly into the workflows of financial professionals, not as a separate tool they have to context-switch into, but as intelligence woven into the systems they already use. That can take many forms – from meeting preparation and product insights to tools that help advisors refine how they engage with clients and improve over time.
The unifying thread is data. Personalized, trustworthy, AI-powered experiences are only possible when data is unified enterprise-wide. Without that foundation, you are not personalizing — you are guessing.
Democratizing AI Across the Organization
I've seen this pattern play out across industries – insurance, real estate, professional sports, and media & entertainment. The organizations that win with transformational technology are never the ones that centralize it in an IT function and call it done. They are the ones that democratize it: making AI capability accessible, legible, and useful to colleagues across every function.
The organizations making real progress are not just building AI tools – they are building AI fluency: helping teams understand how to interpret outputs, where to trust automation, and where human judgement remains essential.
The Carriers That Will Lead
With $483 trillion in projected retirement savings shortfalls by 2050, the demand for trusted financial guidance is only going to intensify. The carriers that are positioned to meet it will not be the ones with the most AI tools. They will be the ones that have built the right operating model, owned the experience layer, and treated AI not as a pilot project but as organizational infrastructure.
That is a harder problem than it looks. But it is the right one to solve.
