Capitalizing on a data-driven future is fundamental to reclaiming insurance's rightful place as the backbone of societal resilience and progress.
The future of insurance hinges on relationships. These relationships extend between people, their possessions, health, future, present, companies, families and ability to thrive in the face of losses.
It's a complex web that insurers must navigate. It extends beyond customers to include ecosystems - comprising both in-house innovations and integrated partner solutions - their staff, and adaptive business models and pricing that all interact simultaneously. At the core of this relational network lies data, the foundation upon which insurers must build sustainable, adaptive enterprises.
For example, if insurers hope to adopt AI as a foundational tool for delivering smarter, more adaptive customer experiences, the business and supporting technology model will need to change substantially. Harnessing multi-agent AI and applying it responsibly and securely across operations requires a robust data model. One that centers data on the customer and the dynamic world they inhabit, processes it in a fluid, near real-time manner and then integrates the resulting insights into personalized customer experiences.
Consider this scenario: You're involved in a car accident and press your car's "help" button. Instantly, emergency services and roadside assistance are alerted and dispatched to your location. Your family receives an automated text, reassuring them that you're safe, while your car begins interacting with a network of connected systems. The car initiates your insurance claim, retrieving policy details, assessing damage via integrated sensors and pre-filling forms for you.
As the process unfolds, you receive real-time notifications: repair options tailored to your location, transparent updates on claim progress and reminders about next steps. The system anticipates your needs, suggesting rental car services or alternative transport arrangements, ensuring your journey is minimally disrupted.
This is the power of data orchestration -- an intelligent and connected data ecosystem working together to transform stressful moments into smooth, supportive experiences.
However, disconnected, policy-centric insurers will continue to struggle to participate in this data-driven world. The question is, what does the insurance sector need to do to harness the value of data orchestration and apply it to transform customer experiences for the better?
In short, a fundamental rethinking of how insurance is built.
Insurers must shift from being policy-centric to customer-centric, ensuring their systems can adapt dynamically through the seamless flow of data. Whether that's enabling smooth integrations or rapidly shaping personalized experiences through low-code user interface (UI) capability tools, adaptability must be at the core of their design.
This adaptivity is reinforced by being born into the cloud as opposed to adapted to be hosted by it. This creates significant core resiliency and transferability between cloud platforms.
Such a foundation gives insurers the potential to operate like e-commerce style businesses, offering innovative products that address whole insurance needs. This approach also empowers them to overcome challenges in selling, servicing and partnering across a diverse technological ecosystem.
This is about creating a true adaptive future. One where data is no longer abstracted, stored, analyzed and then painstakingly reintegrated through layers of legacy systems and policy-based architecture. A future where insights don't have to be manually engineered back into the customer experience only to be hard-coded and rendered inflexible over time.
For those in multiple partnerships, the challenges are even greater -- constantly reconfiguring how data interacts with new services or ecosystems.
Principally, businesses need to intelligently orchestrate customers and build relationships and products and services into those relationships -- doing so in ever-widening ecosystems.
Data-driven futures are about treating data as a perishable asset, constantly mining it for insight and acting on it. AI will do much of the analysis and even much of the customer orchestration over the coming years, but even this lower level of use for AI is difficult if you're not built right. This is potentially at the heart of the legacy issue and why it is only now arriving at its crunch point.
Operating more efficiently, keeping up with regulation and competing on price has worked for insurers, but at this stage even doing those things competitively will require a significant shift in enterprise design.
It's time for a change, and intelligently orchestrating data is fundamental to all of it.
