What’s next for insurtech? Industry leader shares insights

While the insurtech industry has primarily focused on leveraging artificial intelligence for automation, Dan Schuleman, founder and CEO of Qumis said the next step is figuring out how to use it as a “strategic weapon” of transformation.

“The major trend is on automation,” Schuleman said. “As we all know, insurance is a business of paper-pushing, traditionally. So there are ripe opportunities to plop AI in to optimize the pushing of that paper. And I think that was the main thrust of the focus for a lot of the different AI companies, the startups, the vendors and the buyers.”

However, he added that companies now must figure out how to “transcend from pure operations into more of innovation and strategy.”

“I think the immediate focus is really on process automation, but I really think the next horizon there is using AI as the strategic weapon to win and grow your business — and I think people are still figuring out exactly what that looks like,” he said.

Moving beyond operations

According to Schuleman, most of the push for automation is “driven by a lot of the buyers being the operations roles at large companies, where their general remit is already to enhance operations.”

“AI is a perfect and natural fit for that,” he said. “Obviously, you can make various paper-based processes faster and easier using AI, but what does it actually mean for the premise of AI to transform your business to win deals or handle claims with net new insights that you either weren’t able to get before or were restricted to a select few of really, really experienced people?”

For instance, he noted that the main lens through which companies are adopting AI seems to be efficiency gains from “automating back-office processes, a lot of which are done by large workforces.”

However, he said his company, Qumis, is more “interested in the lens of how AI can be a cognitive enhancement to folks who are already experts.”

“How can we make the entire workforce smarter? How can we make the business of insurance more intelligent? I think that’s the real premise of AI: making the sector smarter comprehensively,” Schuleman said.

He suggested this kind of approach is “the true premise of what AI can do to transform the industry.”

“This kind of longer-term and larger view of true business transformation using AI and what does it mean to operate as a smarter firm - that’s starting to take hold. I’ve seen that start to crystallize, and I think the buying behavior is going to mature more in that direction,” Schuleman said.

Major barriers to adoption remain

As the industry eyes deeper AI transformation and innovative use cases, Schuleman cautioned that some major challenges remain when it comes to AI adoption across the board.

“I think we’re still at the early end of the innovation adoption curve, where it’s not truly mainstream,” he noted. “I think part of that is from concerns about general accuracy and reliability, because this is a regulated industry and the regulators haven’t truly caught up on all of this as well. So no one knows where that’s going to land.”

However, Schuleman said that getting buy-in from employees and building trust in AI are also two major concerns that can be barriers for longer-term industry adoption at scale.

“Most of the people who are excited about AI are the early tech adopters now. But the folks who aren’t early tech adopters, they’re using it more because of company mandates than true, native curiosity. I think a large portion of the workforce is more interested in just doing their job,” he said.

He noted that a large part of the insurance workforce is “quite seasoned,” is “used to their ways” and is used to the business being “operated in a certain way for a very long time.” He suggested this can make it challenging for them to adapt to new technologies very quickly.

However, he added that digital transformation initiatives within the last 15 to 20 years, such as moving away from paper to PDFs and digital formats, were also a “quite a big shift in how business was done” — but the workforce was able to adapt.

“I think that’s the type of shift that we’re in the very beginning of seeing here with what AI is allowing to happen that might not have been possible before,” Schuleman said. “And so, we’ll have to figure out the AI transformation processes and initiatives and change management.”

At the same time, he suggested the industry is not “at that mainstream level of trust yet,” especially amid concerns that AI tools and agents could potentially replace insurance jobs.

“I think there are levels of distrust, both in terms of the literal outputs and changing how things are done — whether it can be reliable and accurate, and whether it’s coming for my job or not. Those are unanswered questions at this point and barriers for the more mainstream AI adoption,” Schuleman said.

In this respect, he said the onus falls on insurtech startups and vendors to ensure AI products are “good and people like using them, and that it actually does provide value.”

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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 [email protected].