While it often seems that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, this month’s interview suggests that insurance claims operations have been learning from missteps they’ve made as they’ve innovated over the last decade.

Chris Bassett, a senior director with Capgemini US, says claims operations have moved past the sorts of “shiny objects” that tempted all of us in the first rush of enthusiasm about insurtech and are taking a mature approach to improving customer experience and operational efficiency.

While we’re all intrigued by the possibilities with generative AI, Bassett says the industry is taking “a notably more cautious approach than with previous technological innovations. Chief claims officers are taking a responsible stance, carefully ring-fencing trials and waiting for the technology to mature before full implementation…. This marks a shift from a few years ago when there was more eagerness to experiment with emerging technologies like IoT and chatbots.”

Read more about Claims >

Sponsored by Boxx Insurance

Watching cyber insurance mature over the past decade has been fascinating, with attacks and counterattacks reminiscent of the old Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine – just at high speed, with serious stakes and with a clear delineation between the good guys and the bad guys. 

Cyber insurance began with a stark realization – not just that it was needed but that existing policies might cover a major risk that insurers very much didn’t want to be covering. At the same time that carriers started offering cyber policies, they were rewriting general liability policies to make very clear that cyber attacks weren’t covered.

Early attacks focused on stealing Social Security numbers, credit card information and other data that the bad guys could use to impersonate people. But credit card companies responded with, among other measures, faster response to fraudulent purchases and with secure chips in credit cards. 

So hackers went to a new level, hacking into corporate systems, stealing and encrypting data necessary for running a business and demanding ransom in return for tools that would decrypt the data. But then the good guys responded by not just improving their defenses but by creating backups that they would use if their main systems were compromised. 

Now we’re on to the new battle.

Read more about Cyber >

Sponsored by Nearmap

Maybe a dozen years ago, I spoke on a panel with a founder of Opower, who told me something about motivating customers that could help insurers encourage policyholders to make their properties more resilient in the face of growing threats from wildfires, hurricanes and more.

He had begun his career as a political consultant – he told me ruefully that he turned out to be very good at getting a candidate to finish second… meaning it was time to find a new career. He did learn one key thing, The best way to increase voter turnout was to put a note in a mailbox telling the residents how often they had voted in the past and – this is the genius part – how they stacked up versus their neighbors. People are competitive. They may not feel motivated to vote, but if that couple next door can find the time….

Read more about Predict & Prevent >

Sponsored by JobsOhio

To date, many of us writing about generative AI have emphasized the need to harvest all the low-hanging fruit: the easy gains in efficiency that have become available. But maybe it’s time to start looking higher in the tree.

I write that largely based on this month’s interview, with Pete Blackshaw of BrandRank.ai and Ron Rock of JobsOhio, where we talked about what Pete calls the “answer economy.” The term comes from the change in search engines. They no longer just supply links to sources that might answer a query. They use AI to summarize those sources and present an answer that usually doesn’t require going deeper.

Read more about AI >

Since the dawn of the Insurtech movement a decade-plus ago, we’ve had three waves of innovation concerning the customer experience.

The first was based on the fear of being “Amazoned.” Insurers looked at the company’s One-Click capability and general ease-of-use, then stared in dismay at all the forms that were required in insurance, at the legalese in the lengthy contracts, at the lengthy back-and-forths. Insurers worried that some tech giant could do a cannonball in insurance and displace the incumbents as Amazon had done to so many traditional retailers, so they tried hard to become friendlier to the customer.

Read more about Customer Experience >

Sponsored by Verikai

The ITL team will focus on Health for the month of June 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. 

The ITL team will focus on IoT for the month of July 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

The ITL team will focus on Operational Efficiency for the month of August 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

The ITL team will focus on Talent Gap for the month of September 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

The ITL team will focus on Resilience and Sustainability for the month of October 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

The ITL team will focus on Underwriting for the month of November 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

The ITL team will focus on Workers Comp for the month of December 2025. Check back at the start of the month for six feature articles, exclusive commentary from Editor-In-Chief Paul Carroll and an expert interview. If you have interest in sponsoring this month's Focus, please reach out to lachowicz@theinstitutes.org

Sponsored by InvoiceCloud

In the 1980s, my boss told me he had a system for dealing with dunning notices. He made plenty of money to cover his only somewhat extravagant lifestyle. He just hated being pestered. So if he was late paying a bill and got a notice, he'd throw it away. He'd do the same with the next one and the one after that and the one after that, until he was threatened with being referred to collections. Then he'd send a check for all but $1.50 of what he owed, knowing the vendor would keep sending him monthly notices. When the notices again became threatening enough, he'd send a check for $1.56. Even though he'd only have the tiniest balance with the vendor, they'd keep notifying him about it every month. 

The goal was to penalize the vendor by getting it to spend as much as possible on billing and processing payments – maybe even more than he owed. It helped him that we were living in Brussels, so the vendors chasing him down had to pay for international postage.

While I'm in favor of paying bills rather than playing games, my boss' stunt has made me sensitive ever since to the cost of moving paper around – and the insurance industry is awash in paper. So I was happy to get to interview Kyle Evancoe, VP of sales at InvoiceCloud, for this month's ITL Focus on claims. The company is addressing one of the big sources of paper in claims, by helping firms accept premiums digitally and make payments through whatever digital means is preferred by the customer, to cut down on all those checks and all the expense that goes with them.

Read more about Claims >

How bad has the cybersecurity issue become? Well, The Economist, not known for hysteria, published a story in late December with the headline, "How ransomware could cripple countries, not just companies."

The magazine noted that the British Library, one of the most important in the world, had been hacked in October. The data for its catalog of 14 million books, used by researchers around the globe, was encrypted, and the hackers demanded a ransom. The library declined to pay and has only gradually been able to restore its services.  

Read more about Cyber >

The horrific combined ratios in homeowners, auto and some other lines have drawn even more attention than usual to underwriting. So this month's ITL Focus is especially timely. 

To suggest some ways to improve profitability, I turned first to Jess Keeney, chief product and technology officer at Duck Creek Technologies. In our interview – which I encourage you to read in full – she talks about the importance of personalizing underwriting and says AI makes that possible in new ways. In particular, AI can pull together more data than the underwriter previously had access to, which allows for a deeper understanding of the client and of the risks. AI also can automate routine tasks, giving underwriters more time to dig deeper into an application. 

Read more about Underwriting >

We seem to be in a moment where we're taking a deep breath on generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT. The enthusiasm over the past year and a half has been extraordinary, and we can all see how AI will at least improve productivity and perhaps make more revolutionary changes in insurance. But we haven't seen any killer apps like the electronic spreadsheet that sold so many Apple II's in the late 1970s and 1980s and launched the personal computer revolution. And we're waiting.

We're not in what Gartner would call the Trough of Disillusionment on their Technology Hype Cycle. But we are in a Trough of Where Do We Go From Here? 

Read more about AI >

My request of insurance companies for some time has been that they provide a customer experience like airlines do. 

That surely sounds odd. Airlines are known for awful service. But they've started doing a small thing that I find useful and that insurers should aim to duplicate. 

Read more about CX>

Sponsored by JobsOhio

When I decided a decade ago that my work on innovation should zero in on insurance, I was struck by how many lines overlapped, especially concerning our health. There was health insurance in its many forms – employer-provided, individual and government-provided as the main piece but also the numerous supplemental lines, such as long-term disability. There was also a major healthcare component to workers' comp, to auto insurance and, in a way, to life insurance, given that carriers have clear incentives to help policyholders stay alive as long as possible.  

I thought a long-term goal for insurance could be – should be? – a Health for Me approach. I just want to stay as healthy as I can and have access to care when I need it. I don't care what's happening behind the scenes to provide me that sort of coverage but figure the setup is more efficient for all of us if fewer entities and policies/contracts are involved.

Read more about Life & Health>

While many of us in the industry have applauded the progress by telematics and other forms of the Internet of Things, we've learned the hard way that policyholders often don't see things the way we do. 

Where we see data gathering that will let us price more accurately, rewarding those who pose lesser risks, some policyholders see an attempt to punish them. Where we see the opportunity to help policyholders understand their risks, giving them a chance to reduce their exposure and head off many losses, some policyholders see Big Brother.
 

Read more about IOT>

Discussions on operations and strategy tend to happen separately. First, you figure out the strategy. Then you decide how to turn the strategy into a budget and operationalize it. But what if you can gain a strategic advantage by consistently improving your operational efficiency faster than your competitors do? Wouldn’t that change the nature of the discussions?

McKinsey did some extensive research for a book, “Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick,” several years ago that found that operational efficiency was, in fact, one of the key strategic levers available to a business. And insurance has long struck me as a wildly inefficient industry, with all its paper forms, checks and even fax machines.

Read more about Operational Efficiency>

A nephew of mine neatly embodies the talent issue facing the insurance industry.

After he earned an economics degree at William & Mary, his first job five years ago was at an insurtech, but he got bored, so he quit and became a professional gambler focused on sports. He earned more in his first year than the combined annual salaries of my younger brother (a longtime editor at the Wall Street Journal) and his mother (an adjuster with a major insurance company). In the first week of this year’s college football season, he earned more in a single day than he had in his first year with the insurtech. But the major books are shutting him down, because they can see how much money he’s taking from them, so he’s thinking he may look for a real job in the spring, after college football and basketball – his two favorite seasons – conclude.

I think a Wall Street firm is the logical landing spot for him, because he’s not only super-bright in a mathematical way and is a cold-blooded gambler but is a nearly scratch golfer and is very funny, so he’d be great with clients, but he’s certainly open to returning to insurance. My question: Let’s say some company in our insurance ecosystem is fortunate enough to land my nephew; how do you keep him interested after a year or two?

Read more about Talent Gap>

Sponsored by PwC

Hurricane Helene seemed to be mocking a recently formed collaboration among insurance companies, Duke University, and the University of Georgia to address the risks caused by climate change.

The group, known as CIRCAD, held its inaugural meeting in the Buckhead section of Atlanta early this month, and I attended. I intended to tell you in this week’s Six Things newsletter about some of the intriguing presentations and the possibilities for collaboration between our industry and these universities, with federal agencies likely joining in. Then I saw pictures of Buckhead underwater over the weekend as Helene whacked the area. A Duke professor I’d been corresponding with, who had gone silent, resurfaced Sunday night to say he’d been almost completely without internet access or cell service back home in North Carolina since Friday because the devastation from Helene had been “profound.”

Read more about Resilience & Sustainability >

Bill Zachry has long been a leading light on workers’ comp because of the pioneering work he did as the group vice president for risk management at Safeway, so I was delighted to catch up with him through the recent National Comp conference, where he was a co-chair.

What I had never realized is just how personal the focus on recovery was for Bill. I knew him as someone who took a very broad view of the causes and effects in workers’ comp and knew he had achieved huge cost reductions at Safeway by being MORE attentive to injured workers, rather than trying to save at their expense. But I didn’t know that, as Bill told me:

Read more about Workers' Comp>

Sponsored by Oliver Wyman

Happy Birthday to ChatGPT, which turned two years old on Saturday, Nov. 30.

There’s been a huge amount of excitement, plus some of the usual reality-settling-in that comes with a technology breakthrough. Oh, and a boatload of uncertainty about where generative AI can provide the most benefit – and about whether some competitor is going to nail the technology’s use and leap ahead of the rest of us.

To figure out where the insurance industry stands in its use of generative AI and where we can go next, I sat down with Fady Khayatt, a partner at Oliver Wyman 

Read more about Generative AI>

In the going on 10 years that I've been editing ITL, there have been two truisms about claims.

First is that claims are "the moment of truth" for insurers. That's certainly true, and, taking that notion to heart, insurers have made real progress. They've made it easier for insureds to report claims -- via app, sending in their own pictures rather than waiting for an adjuster, and so on. They've used new technologies, such as drones to survey damage after a storm, and have become much better at triage so they respond faster to the situations that are the most important and most urgent. Many have institutionalized compassion, for instance by quickly providing money to people forced out of their homes in a major storm, rather than making them wait for a full inspection and settlement. I could go on.

The second truism, which has taken its full form more recently, is that the industry needs to get to straight-through processing. It's certainly worth heading in that direction. You can already see the benefits that have come from those apps for reporting claims, submitting photos of damage, etc. But it also seems to me that making straight-through processing has obscured some real opportunities for progress.

Read more about Claims >

The thought that keeps rattling around in my head as I think about underwriting these days is: How can you make accurate predictions about risk based on historical experience... when the world has decided to throw so much of that experience out the window?

COVID-19 changed all sorts of assumptions about life expectancy, at least in the short run and perhaps in the long run; we just don't know yet. The pandemic also reset our patterns of work, changing the risks associated with buildings and with those who work in offices and factories -- or maybe not, as more companies insist on a return to the office.  

Inflation came out of nowhere for the first time in decades and made just about every sort of claim more expensive, especially in auto, where supply chain issues sent car prices through the roof. Now, inflation is subsiding... we think... but how fast? 

And don't get me started on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a stunner that not only created tons of business risks but that greatly stepped up the general geopolitical uncertainty, including on the possibility that China will invade Taiwan.

I wish I had an answer for underwriters. Instead, as usual, I have a story. It's one that was told to me in 2000 by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor who rather unexpectedly found himself being asked to be COO at Harrah's and who reinvented loyalty programs, initially for Harrah's and eventually for the whole gambling industry. 

The analogy is far from perfect. Regulations will prevent insurers from implementing many of the ideas. That's why I used the word "dream" in the headline, rather than offering a concrete proposal. But there may be aspects of his ideas that can help with underwriting -- and it's a good story....

Read more about Underwriting >

For me, the emergence of cyber insurance as a separate line dates back a decade, to when Target was hacked and had 40 million credit card numbers and personal information about 70 million customers stolen. Target was seemingly so well-protected, with its massive IT department and careful security procedures, and the vulnerability so seemingly trivial (in an HVAC system) that the news sent everyone scrambling. 
 
But what to do? 

Well, policyholders hoped their general liability policies covered cyber issues, or at least could be easily extended to cover those risks. Insurers, meanwhile, worked to make a clear division between GL and cyber and, in the face of such uncertainty and potentially enormous payouts, set rates as high as they could. Hackers, of course, plunged into what they saw as a huge payday. 
 
Ten years on, we seem to finally be approaching some stability. 

Read more about Cyber >

Maybe a dozen years ago, I read a book called "Half the Sky," about the need to end oppression of girls and women. It's a great book, full of powerful examples, but it's really the title that has stuck with me. It comes from a Chinese saying, that "women hold up half the sky." That's hardly a surprise, but I'd also never seen it put that simply. Women hold up half the sky, and half of everything else, too. Extend that thinking just a touch, and you see the sort of talent that exists in minorities of every ilk -- and how much we all miss if we don't recognize that talent, nurture it and find ever-more-important roles for those with that talent. 
 
Insurers complain about a talent gap. Well, there's a lot out there that has historically been overlooked.
 
The way I was raised, there was never any question about the diversity of talent. My mother was the first in her family to graduate from college and had the temperament and intellect to run a large organization -- which she more or less did by having eight of us kids. My five sisters not only all have college degrees but have four advanced degrees among them, including a juris doctor and a Ph.D. The schools granting those degrees include Harvard, Wellesley and Johns Hopkins. My daughters graduated from Cal and Yale, and one has a law degree from George Washington. 
 
The attitude of the women in my life has basically been: Do try to keep up.

Read more about DEI >

When I think of the customer experience, I imagine a warm handshake or smile from someone I'm dealing with, empathy about my concerns, expertise, etc., but two experts I spoke to recently say I'm greatly overstating the importance of the softer side. They say the key for customers these days is simple: They want speed. 
 
Fast. Faster. Fastest.
 
Jay Baer, long a guru on the customer experience, says speed is almost as important to consumers these days as price. David Samuels, chief commercial officer at Pie Insurance, a startup that initially focused on workers' comp for small businesses and recently added commercial auto, says the company draws on some 18 to 20 data sources and has built algorithms that let it make decisions automatically on more than half the submissions it receives. A spokeswoman says decisions are made automatically for 73% of class codes.

Of course, while speed may be the most important thing, it's not the only thing, and Jay and I run through the whole list in this month's interview. Here is his summary:

Read more about Customer Experience >

Despite all the possibilities I've read about and considered for the Internet of Things, Dave Wechsler managed to raise a new one in the conversation we had for this month's ITL Focus interview. He suggested that water leaks, fires and other household hazards could be handled as a service that would insulate carriers from the complexity and from the claims, in return for a per-household annual fee. 

Many of you have seen Dave in action as a speaker at conferences during his time as the leader of IoT business initiatives at Comcast or, more recently, as the vice president of growth initiatives at Hippo.  He's now a principal with the venture fund at OMERS, the Ontario pension fund, and had some thoughts on how IoT could get to massive scale.

The IoT, under the name of telematics, is taking hold in transportation, mostly because phones are full of sensors that can be used to evaluate someone's driving and because just about everyone has one with them at all times. But homes have been a trickier proposition. The vast majority are many years or even decades old, so they have to be retrofitted with sensors that can detect water leaks, fires and other hazards. That can be expensive. It can also be unreliable: The sensors may be installed wrong if homeowners do the work themselves or may be placed in areas where they somehow don't quite get hit by, say, the leaking water.

Read more about IoT >

Jamie Yoder, the president and general manager of Sapiens North America, jokes that driverless vehicles are no big deal. The Amish had them decades ago, he says. A farmer would get drunk and fall asleep on the front of bench at the front of his cart, and his horse would eventually start trotting and take him home.

Jamie would know. Even though he now runs the North America operations of a major provider of software products and tools and has made a career out of digital technology, he grew up in an Amish community.

I've heard that joke a few times because I've known Jamie since 1996, when we met via Diamond Technology Partners, where we were partners. I've heard a few other stories, too, because Jamie has been my go-to on lots of insurance-related subjects as he became the insurance practice leader at PwC (which bought Diamond in 2010) and then the president at Snapsheet, an insurtech that has been an innovator in claims management, even before taking on his senior role at Sapiens.

Read more about Operational Efficiency >

In "Billion Dollar Lessons," a book that Chunka Mui and I published in 2008 on the lessons to be learned from 2,500 corporate bankruptcies and major writedowns, we found that companies often kidded themselves about the benefits that would come from synergy. We argued that the only real synergy was, "Do you want fries with that?"

Embedded insurance basically asks a customer, "Do you want some insurance with that?", so I've warmed to the concept over the years. 

The benefits seem clear: Embedding insurance could allow for much lower distribution costs, letting insurers lower premiums, attract more customers and narrow the protection gap -- while giving insurers a massive new customer base.

So far, not much has happened. There is travel insurance and warranties, and bancassurance is popular in some parts of the world, but that's about it. 

Read more about Embedded Insurance >

Sponsored by Oliver Wyman

"No insurance, no finance. No finance, no project. No project, no transition."

Alex Wittenberg, a partner at Oliver Wyman, says that phrase governs the transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy. By now, everyone acknowledges that the transition is under way, but it has to begin with insurance.

And the insurance piece of the puzzle can be so very complicated.

Think about an offshore wind farm. The turbines have to be erected under difficult conditions. The mast may stick 260 meters out of the water. Each blade can be 100 meters long, so the rotor can be 220 meters long.

Wind turbines are huge, powerful, complex machines, and it's hard for insurers to find the technical expertise to fully understand them -- there are few enough experts, and the field is new enough that the experts want to be on the front lines, innovating. Adding to the complications: Installations are tailored to their environment, so even if you can figure out all the technical issues on one project, you can't just apply that learning across the board.

There is, of course, limited historical data, given how innovative these projects are... and the technical issues are just the start.

Read more about Resilience and Sustainability

When cryptocurrencies crashed last year, the many I-told-you-so's tended to dismiss not only the currencies but also the underlying technology: blockchain. Not so fast.

As you'll see in this month's interview, with Patrick Schmid, president of the RiskStream Collaborative, blockchain keeps moving forward and is very close to entering production with at least a couple of applications than can make the industry operate more efficiently. 

In particular, RiskStream's Rapid X, which lets insurers share information on auto accidents, is about to start a pilot that will use production data. Among other things, that pilot will let RiskStream generate real data about the savings in time and money that come when insurers can stop playing phone/email tag and can collaborate via blockchain on filling out the claims documentation. 

Read more about Blockchain >

Sponsored by IntellectAI

Wandering the floor at this year's InsureTech Connect, I had a hard time finding a booth that didn't somehow tie into generative AI. But I think two aspects of the technology are getting short shrift, so I was delighted to be able to explore them in this month's interview, with Megan Pilcher, a senior vice president and the insurance go-to-market leader at IntellectAI. 

First is that generative AI doesn't just let you do work faster. It helps you do work that you otherwise wouldn't get around to. 

For instance, Megan says:

"As an insurance carrier, you'd love to have documentation on every risk that comes through the door because you are going to see that risk again. But when an underwriter prioritizes their work, documenting the accounts they did not write is a less than desirable task. We can start using AI to do that documentation and provide a summary. When the risk comes back the following year and a different underwriter picks it up, they can get a rundown....  
 

Read more about AI >

Sponsored by ICW Group

It's a wonderful thing when incentives line up, and they are in the world of workers' comp. Workers, employers and insurers all have reasons to make the workplace safer, preventing injuries to employees while generating savings for employers and their insurers.

That's why, at a time when rates are rising, often rapidly, in so many insurance lines, premiums for workers' comp have been trending downward for years. There is room for much more progress, too, as various technologies kick in. 

For instance, cameras can spot dangers, such as water spills, in a factory and alert someone to mop it up before anyone trips and falls and gets injured. Cameras can also spot near-misses, tipping off a manager that a process is dangerous so they can warn employees and change how things are done, before someone gets, say, a hand caught in a machine. Workers can wear devices that monitor their movements and make sure they aren't creating stresses that could injure them. There are even exoskeletons that can assist workers, for instance in lifting heavy boxes. 

Read More about Workers Comp

When you strip insurance down to its essence, there are just three components related to indemnification. There is a client/contract. There is a yes/no mechanism for determining whether a payment is triggered to that client under that contract, as well as the amount. And there is capital, whether from an insurer, a reinsurer or the capital markets. That’s it: a client, a judgment mechanism and money.

Read more about  Parametric Insurance >

While blockchain has been an intriguing topic for some time now, interest has skyrocketed in recent months. 

ITL Focus February 2022 Sponsored by Gigaforce 

Read more about Blockchain >

For an industry that has long been considered sleepy, life insurance has a lot going on. 

Read more about Life and Health >

Sometimes, innovation takes time. 

Some 30 years ago, I wrote an article for the front page of the second section of the Wall Street Journal that declared a revolution in forms. We were far enough along in the personal computer revolution that software companies were coming out with products that would let users fill out forms on-screen, speeding the process and eliminating the errors that occurred as someone had to interpret people's handwriting. Even more magical, the spread of local area networks meant that information could flow straight from my screen into a corporate database, with no never to ever print the form and have someone re-enter the data.  

Everything I wrote was correct, and forms did take a major step forward, but, here we are three decades later, still drowning in forms. And the insurance industry is Exhibit A.

Read more about Automation and RPA >

In this month's interview for ITL Focus, my longtime friend and colleague John Sviokla takes us through some of the unintended consequences that digitization could bring to insurance claims.

Read more about Claims >

Not quite a decade ago, a colleague and I did some consulting on innovation for the CEO of one of the biggest personal lines insurers, and he expressed great frustration with his agent force. "Every time I try something new, even when it's going to benefit the agent channel, they turn around and kick me in the [crotch]," he said.

In the years since, I've watched the power of agents and brokers only grow -- just look at how much valuations for agencies and brokerages have been climbing and at the much slower increases for carriers. And agents and brokers have mostly guarded the model that has let so many prosper for so long: They get paid commissions on product sales, rather than being paid for advice, and are rewarded for building and then maintaining a book of business rather than primarily for continually adding clients. 

Certainly, the industry's push for digital innovation has led to more cooperation. In particular, insurers are trying to make themselves easier to work with, if only to try to become the carrier of choice for independent agents. But is that really the best we can do? 

Bill Walrath thinks not.

Read more about Agent and Broker >

Sponsored by AgentSync

When my younger daughter was a freshman at Yale, I was encouraged that her intro to economics class included a fairly long section on the economics of insurance -- essentially, an exercise in determining how much people valued the peace of mind they get from having a policy in place. Insurance certainly never came up in any of the economics classes I took way back when, and I took the material as a good sign: A top-tier college was making insurance intriguing for smart, young students.

Alas, I couldn't interest my daughter in the insurance industry. And there seems to be a lot of that indifference going around, based on the persistent concerns in the industry about the talent gap. 

Jenn Knight, co-founder and chief technology officer at AgentSync, offers some intriguing thoughts on a way forward in this month's interview. 

Read More About Talent Gap >

Workers comp has things doubly bad -- it has to deal not only with its own staffing issues but those of its clients. 

As Mark Walls, vice president of client engagement at Safety National, explains in this month's interview, many companies are having to ask employees to do more to cover for gaps in staffing. Companies are also being less rigorous about pre-employment physicals and may rush people into action. The risk of injury is rising as a result.

At the same time, workers' comp carriers and third-party administrators are having to deal with their own shortages of adjusters, nurse care managers and so on, while dealing with caregivers that are struggling to line up enough doctors and nurses.

The result? Not pretty.

Read More About Workers Comp >

When I think of the potential for artificial intelligence, I hark back to my days at the Wall Street Journal, taking notes in my home-brewed shorthand in one of those long, skinny notebooks you may have seen reporters carrying around in their suitcoat pockets. I still break out in a sweat when I recall interviewing the president of Mexico in the mid-'90s, in Spanish. I only knew how to take notes in English, so I had to translate on the fly, while still thinking about my line of questioning—and concentrating furiously so I would quote him so accurately that I wouldn't cause an international incident. 

While AI would have been zero help back then, today it's remarkable. I just record an interview on my phone, and AI transcribes the conservation in real time with remarkable accuracy.

So, if you want to think about where AI can go from here, you can look back 25-plus years and see that the difference between then and now is, well, like magic, and then start to think about 10, 15 or 25 years from now.

Read more about AI and Machine Learning

Sponsored by IntellectAI

The cyber insurance market is full of good news and bad news, good news and bad news, good news and bad news.

Let's start with the good news.

Targets are getting smarter about how to defend themselves. That's by far the biggest bit of good news. The improved defense is partly because employees are being trained to avoid phishing and other types of attacks.

Read more about Cyber Threats

Sponsored by Oliver Wyman

As I talked with speakers following the recent Global Insurance Forum about resilience and sustainability, I got the sense that the industry is leaning into climate change much more than in the past.

That's partly because events such as Hurricane Ian dramatize the risks but also because insurers are seeing ways to help clients and, more broadly, society, while also seeing business opportunities.

We obviously have a long way to go on resilience and sustainability, and I don't think we're moving fast enough, but we do seem to be making some progress, both in helping society, writ large, and in finding new ways to serve customers.

Read more about Resilience and Sustainability

Sponsored by Chubb

I recently read a fascinating book, "The Dream Machine," about the intellectual history of the computer world through the early 2000s. 
 
As a geek of long-standing, I was amused to learn that a mythic figure from the early days would end animated conversations on the streets of Cambridge, Mass., by asking which way he'd been facing when the conversation began -- that way, he'd know whether he'd been leaving the Harvard faculty club and had thus eaten lunch or whether he was on the way there. 
 
The book also filled in details for me about how computers had passed through key stages: from glorified calculators in the 1940s, to mainframes for batch processing in the 1950s and 1960s, to minicomputers and time-sharing in the 1960s and 1970s, to personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s and to the internet in the 1990s and beyond. Progress has obviously continued since the book was published 20 years ago: with smartphones, in particular, and Wi-Fi changing the world in the 2000s and beyond, but also with search engines, social media and a host of other innovations.
 
Based on that history, I'm confident that one of the biggest drivers of innovation -- maybe THE biggest -- at the moment is the Internet of Things. 
 

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Much of the focus on innovation has related to personal lines. That makes some sense: Policies tend to be more cookie-cutter than in commercial lines, and individuals, spoiled by Amazon and other online resources, have demanded a better experience from insurers. But don’t sleep on commercial lines. As businesses see what’s changing in personal lines, they aren’t going to be left behind.

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Blockchain has held out promise for some time now and it may finally be coming into its own, with some uses starting to move into production. We’ve collected our thought leaders’ latest thinking on the topic in this month’s ITL FOCUS, as well as an interview with John Sviokla about the future impacts and strategic implications of blockchain, the ITL On Demand ‘Future of Blockchain’ webinar series, and more.

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Strategy is what you don’t do. That was the dictum of the late, great Mel Bergstein, who way back in 1994 founded the pioneering digital strategy firm Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. (It became part of PwC in 2010.) I heard Mel’s line a lot, as a partner with Diamond from 1996 through 2003, and I think his are words to live by in the insurance industry these days. Everyone seems to have gotten the memo about the need to digitize insurance and to explore innovative ideas, but the present typically creates a real drag that slows movement toward the future.

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Mark Twain reportedly once responded to a rumor of a serious illness by saying, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Insurance agents and brokers could have said the same thing over the past decade and will likely be parrying those rumors for years to come. There’s no doubt that agents & brokers inhabit a world going digital and not every agent will migrate easily into the ever-more-digital world, but those who do will find the work more rewarding, both for themselves and for their ever-more-loyal clients.

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In high school, a friend of mine had a poster on his wall that read, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

That pretty well summarizes how the world of cybersecurity and insurance works. Companies may feel paranoid for looking over their shoulder all the time, expecting something back to happen, but we all know that there are plenty of bad guys out to find all the victims they can.

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The world of work turned upside-down and inside-out beginning 15 months ago, as the pandemic shut down offices and forced so very many of us to work from home.

Now that we’re beginning to reverse this process, insurers will have to sort through all sorts of new issues. Here’s one: When is the place where a worker works a “workplace,” and when is it not? Welcome to the new world of workers’ compensation

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Insurance companies are finding that they have to reinvent chunks of their businesses to really get the customer experience right. Yes, they have to focus on the ways that they touch customers, through agents and brokers, through call centers, through adjusters and through an increasingly broad array of electronic means. But a customer doesn’t just experience a company through a direct communication. Customers also experience, for instance, how long and painful an underwriting process or a claim is.

And here’s the thing: This emphasis on customer experience requires a revolution for companies.

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Cognitive computing is a funny beast. Every time you hit your target, you find that another pops up off in the distance.

When I first saw a demonstration of speech recognition, some 30 years ago, I was mightily impressed that the computer understood a few words. If I had seen what would be possible today, I’d have been stunned. But now? Oh, that’s just Siri or Alexa. And why didn’t auto-correct guess exactly what I wanted to say?

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“…It seems to me that the lines will increasingly blur between life insurance and financial management, given that life insurance is an important financial asset; people often think about their finances, and life insurance can become a natural part of that focus. I could also see the trend toward embedded insurance expanding the life insurance market — why couldn’t a term life policy be, for instance, embedded in a mortgage when someone buys a building, to make sure the purchase is secure even if something happens to the buyer?

Over the years, I’ve had people tell me life insurance is boring. I don’t see it that way at all.”

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In the face of catastrophic weather, insurers are doing what insurers do: helping identify, quantify and mitigate the risks, while making customers whole when disasters strike.

They are also increasingly digging further into the roots of the problem. As you’ll see in the articles we’ve highlighted for this month, insurers are focusing more on how to raise the alarm about climate change and on how to make the world more resilient in the face of the challenges that we face today and that are surely.

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In all my years covering all manner of technology, telematics may have caught me off-guard the most. When I first wrote about Progressive’s auto telematics program, Snapshot, in 1998, it seemed like a slam dunk. Of course, it made sense to monitor how people drove and to price their insurance accordingly.

Or not.

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For nearly 30 years, I’ve been hearing about smart homes. Even before a commercial version of the internet browser was invented in the early 1990s, the rich, geeky types I dealt with in my travels at the Wall Street Journal were figuring out ways to wire their homes to ward off possible intruders. 

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