What AI transformation really means for insurance jobs and skills

As advances in artificial intelligence create new roles in the insurance industry and transform more traditional ones, industry experts say the key skills needed in this new age are more about practical application of AI rather than just being able to use technology itself.

Lokesh Vijay Kumar, senior manager of staff software engineering at Geico, said prompting techniques have become “table stakes” in today’s world.

Speaking based on his experience and not representing Geico’s position, he said, “Those skills do matter, but the more durable skill” is being able to “understand the risks, what are the edge cases, what behaviors did we have in our existing systems and understand dealing with customers, and then determine whether that AI adoption is going to produce the right outcome for us.”

He said that teaching someone a new tool “relatively quickly” is quite possible. But, with AI developing at such a rapid pace, new tools are also replaced or changed just as fast. On the other hand, he said, “it’s much harder to teach years of business context and judgment.

“I would say those skills will really survive the next model or tool change, and I would say the goal shouldn’t be to create thousands of prompt engineers. That’s not what we really want. It should be to create a workforce that knows how to work effectively and responsibly within the AI space, and at a faster pace,” Kumar said.

Insurance-specific tech jobs

There’s no doubt that the advent of AI has created new jobs in the insurance landscape. As Daniel Herrington, chief AI officer at the Zebra, said, “How many chief AI officers did you know in insurance a year ago?

“That probably wasn’t a title that you saw running around that much, and it definitely wasn’t a title that I was familiar with a year ago. I was a product manager at Google before joining the Zebra as their chief AI officer,” he told InsuranceNewsNet.

He’s not alone. Herrington said there has been a trend of technical experts moving into new executive insurance roles as the industry scales its AI adoption.

But Kumar said he has found many of the new roles are centered more on evaluation rather than creation of AI models.

“The job that didn’t exist on my team three years ago and is now essential is the person who defines what ‘correct’ looks like for a system,” Kumar said. “Before an AI capability goes anywhere near a customer, someone must write hundreds of real-world scenarios, decide what a passing response is and maintain that suite as the business changes. That’s a full-time craft now.”

‘We all lost our jobs’

In contrast, there has been much debate about how AI will affect more traditional insurance roles such as claims adjusters, and whether those jobs could be replaced.

Kumar said those roles “aren’t disappearing; they’re moving up the judgment chain.”

“This is the part I think gets reported wrong,” he said. “When AI takes over intake, lookups and routine filing, the human doesn’t end up with a lighter day. The expectation and the bar are higher — deliver and evaluate faster and ensure launch readiness. They end up with a day made entirely of hard cases, because the easy ones never reach them anymore.”

Jennifer Lee, president and CEO of Intradiem, said this means traditional roles are being “reinvented.”

“What it really does, rather than displace existing roles — and, frankly, existing humans — is it redesigns the work that they’re doing, and it changes the job description and the skills required,” Lee said. “It won’t displace, but it absolutely will disrupt and change the type of people that you’re looking for.”

For example, she said one of her clients is “even rewriting job descriptions for a lot of what used to be kind of traditional back-office roles to be more client-facing roles and shift those jobs to managing the relationship with the client and to supervise the systems that run the workflow.

“It’s a dramatic shift, but it’s, I think, a more reasonable and acceptable vision for the world of how AI should be incorporated into all of these workflows,” Lee said.

But, from a certain perspective, this reshaping of traditional roles can be viewed as a kind of “job loss,” Herrington said.

“We all lost our jobs; like, AI took all of our jobs. It didn’t take our roles, our roles are still so important, but it took our jobs. You used to be a back-end engineer who studied every line of code; that job is gone. You are now a full-stack implementation engineer,” Herrington said.

Human skills are crucial

With AI now shaping so much of the insurance industry’s workforce, all three experts agreed that human skills such as managing relationships and exercising judgment remain of utmost importance.

Kumar’s advice? Insurers should “skip hiring exclusively externally for AI roles while the people who already understand your regulatory context get nothing.”

“Everyone is hiring for ‘AI skills,’ and that mostly means tooling. In my experience, the real constraint is different,” he said. “Anyone who has leveraged AI tools to improve operational and developer efficiency will know how to translate problems into solutions. The fastest progress I’ve seen came from upskilling people who knew the business and giving them evaluation and review skills, not from importing specialists.”

© Entire contents copyright 2026 by InsuranceNewsNet.com Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reprinted without the expressed written consent from InsuranceNewsNet.com.

Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter, and editor with over 10 years' combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at rayne.morgan@innfeedback.com.