Commentary: Legacy technology platforms were not built for today’s needs

Michael Kovalev's provocative article made many great points:

"Somehow, I can track a $14 sandwich to within 25 feet, but neither I nor my client can see where an endorsement is in a carrier's workflow. ... Information still doesn't flow easily between insureds, agencies and carriers. Many carrier systems don't communicate easily with agency systems, and application programming interfaces are not readily available. Information submitted once often must be submitted again. Status updates require emails and phone calls. Clients have very little visibility into what's happening behind the scenes."

The key language here is "many carrier systems." Legacy technology platforms were not built for today's needs. Monolithic systems, by nature, require the frustrating, repetitive, manual steps Michael describes. An artificial intelligence-native modern platform, however, with a unified data layer, one common language (think: Python), and exceptionally engineered microservices, eliminates the problems Michael so aptly describes. In fact, an effective modern system ties together the carrier, agent, and customer experience, mimicking the sandwich tracking experience so vividly painted in this article.

We've digitized the steps without necessarily eliminating the friction between them. There is evidence that clients notice. J.D. Power's 2025 U.S. Claims Digital Experience Study found that adequate digital status updates were a top driver of customer satisfaction, yet insurers delivered on that measure only 22% of the time.

Insurers should be terrified of this 22% number. But what can they do to raise this score?

Here, it's instructive to understand the difference between automating tasks and automating processes. When I was growing up, we washed dishes by hand (I know – the Stone Age). My mother worked, and she taught my siblings and me how to make dinner, timing the meat, potato dish, vegetables and salad so that everything finished at the same time.

Now most Americans have a dishwasher, the simplest form of automation: a machine does something a person used to do, and the person gets their time back. The dishwasher automates one task (washing dishes) in isolation. It doesn’t know what’s happening in the rest of the kitchen.

But what if you had a fully automated kitchen? Not just a dishwasher, but a system where the recipe determines what gets prepared, when and how. Bread is baked, then a potato goes in the oven, and finally the fish is cooked, all with little need for a person.

That’s the difference between automating a task and automating a process. We can argue about the societal benefits of home automation. But eliminating friction is a worthy goal and will go a long way toward increasing client satisfaction. The question of how is answered by process automation: a connected series of decisions and actions governed by rules, adjusted in real time and coordinated across multiple stages to produce a specific outcome.

"We measure almost everything in insurance. Carriers measure loss ratios, quote ratios, retention and turnaround time. Agencies measure retention, new business, revenue and productivity. We rarely measure how difficult we made the transaction for the client.

How many times have we asked them for information? How much of it did we already have? How long did they go without an update? How many emails, forms, portals and follow-ups did it take to get from renewal review to bound coverage?

These are all great questions. I'd add another: How many clients will leave an agency or carrier that makes their life difficult exactly when they need it simplified?

Consumers are getting savvier about their technology experiences. Agents and carriers that adjust slowly do so at their own peril.

Randy Shain is chief business development officer at Force AI. Contact him at randy.shain@innfeedback.com.