The insurance industry is changing faster than ever. Artificial intelligence, automation, new CRM platforms, digital claims and advanced analytics are attracting significant investment as insurers seek to become faster, more efficient and easier to do business with.
But even good technology does not guarantee successful transformation.
Sometimes the problem begins before a company selects a technology or writes a single line of code.
It begins when we try to change the way people work without involving those people in defining what actually needs to change.
The Timing Problem: Bringing Employees in Too Late
A typical transformation project follows a familiar pattern.
Management identifies a problem. Leaders review KPIs and discuss possible solutions. A project is launched. IT teams or external vendors design and build a new process or system.
Only then are employees brought into the process.
They are shown the new solution, trained to use it, and told how their work will change.
And when resistance appears, we often reach a familiar conclusion: people don't like change.
But perhaps resistance to change is not always the real problem.
Perhaps we simply invited people into the process after all the important decisions had already been made.
If employees first hear about a transformation when they are invited to training on a new system, there is a good chance we have involved them too late.
Beyond Users: Employees as Problem Solvers
Insurance executives see the business through metrics: premium volumes, loss ratios, costs, service levels, productivity, conversion, and customer retention.
We need those metrics.
But employees who work every day with customers, policies, claims, applications, and internal systems see another part of the business.
They know where customers have to call twice. They know where an operator manually transfers information from one system to another. They know where a manager spends 10 minutes completing a task that should take 10 seconds. They know which procedures create work without creating value.
A dashboard can tell management that a process has a problem.
The people working inside that process can often explain why.
That is why early employee involvement should not be treated simply as a matter of corporate culture or employee engagement.
It is also a way to improve the quality of management decisions.
Problem First, Technology Second
We recently looked at the workload within one of our service processes.
From a management perspective, the problem seemed straightforward: a high volume of requests, significant pressure on operators, and a large number of repetitive tasks.
We could have started by looking for a technology to solve it.
Instead, we first asked the people who worked with the process every day: What takes most of your time? Which requests are repetitive? What could be removed or automated? Which situations genuinely require human involvement?
Their answers helped us define the problem more accurately.
Only then did technology become part of the solution.
Today, AI is able to handle around 30% of requests within our medical assistance contact center. In another part of the process, AI supports initial assessment, helping us significantly reduce the volume of routine calls and allowing employees to focus more of their time on cases where human judgment and communication really matter.
But the most important lesson for me is not that AI can replace a certain amount of manual work.
It is this:
Technology can accelerate change. But it cannot always tell you which change your organization actually needs. Very often, your employees can.
Finding the Balance Between Input and Authority
There is, of course, another extreme.
Involving employees in transformation does not mean every management decision should be made collectively.
Leadership still needs to set strategy, establish priorities, allocate budgets, and take responsibility for results.
Not every employee suggestion will be right. People naturally see a process from the perspective of their own role, while management has to consider the entire organization.
But there is a large space between "employees decide everything" and "employees are informed once the solution is ready."
In my experience, this is where the most effective transformation happens.
Leadership sets the direction.
Employees help define the problem.
Technology helps solve it.
And data tells us whether the solution actually worked.
The Ownership Effect
There is another important benefit of early involvement.
When a new process simply arrives from above, employees naturally see it as something external: another system, another procedure, or another management requirement.
The situation is different when people have helped identify the problem, tested potential solutions, provided feedback, and seen that feedback influence the final result.
Not because management has somehow persuaded them to "like transformation."
But because they have some ownership of the change.
This becomes particularly important in large organizations, where even a good strategic decision can lose much of its impact somewhere between the boardroom and the hundreds of employees expected to implement it.
Three Questions to Begin Every Transformation
Before launching the next major CRM, AI, automation or customer experience project, leaders could start by asking the people who work with the process every day three simple questions:
What takes up most of your time today?
What in this process creates no real value for either the company or the customer?
If you could remove or change one thing tomorrow, what would it be?
Their answers will not replace strategy, business analysis or data.
But they may change the problem the company decides to solve.
And that matters, because one of the most expensive mistakes in transformation is not the poor execution of a good solution.
It is the flawless execution of a solution to the wrong problem.
The True Competitive Advantage
Technology is increasingly available to almost every insurer. AI models, cloud platforms, CRM systems, and automation tools are becoming less likely to provide a sustainable competitive advantage on their own.
But an organization's ability to listen to its own people, identify the real problems quickly, and turn that knowledge into action can still be one.
So perhaps the next transformation should not begin with the question:
"What technology should we implement?"
It should begin with a simpler one:
"What do our people already know about this problem that we don't?"
