STOP APPLAUDING YOUR VENDOR’S AI STRATEGY
The insurance industry is drowning in AI theater. Every vendor, from the bloated legacy giants to the shiny-new insurtechs, has slapped AI on their pitch deck.
- AI Submission Intake
- AI Underwriting Assistants
- AI Claims Triage
- AI Fraud Detection
The press releases are relentless, the demo environments are polished, and not one of them is building AI for you. Stop applauding your vendor’s innovation for a second.
Ask the question they’re hoping you won’t:
“WHOSE AI STRATEGY ARE YOU ACTUALLY EXECUTING?”
These aren’t configuration settings you can dial up or down. They’re baked into the architecture. Locked behind the black box. And they were decided by someone whose incentives have nothing to do with your operational objectives.
THERE IS NO CHOICE
Here’s the con hiding in plain sight: your vendors are making consequential, opinionated decisions about how AI runs inside your business. Every model choice. Every automation threshold. Every data flow. Made without you. Announced to you after the fact, buried in a release note.
YOU DIDN’T CHOOSE
Which workflows AI should touch. What data it sees. Where the boundaries are drawn. What risk looks like.
WHY IT MATTERS
Your differentiation was never factored in. Your competitive edge, market position, none of it made it into the one-size-fits-all roadmap that was never yours to begin with.
IT’S NOT INCOMPETENCE. IT’S A MODEL.
This isn’t malicious. It’s just how software gets built for the masses. Vendors serve the median customer. They optimize for the average underwriting philosophy, the generic claims culture, the one-size-fits-all risk appetite. Your differentiation, the thing that actually makes you competitive, doesn’t factor in.
Your AI strategy is a byproduct of your vendor’s product roadmap. Most insurers are sitting inside this reality right now and have no idea.
YOU BOUGHT CONVENIENCE… NOT INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY
The insurance vendor AI strategy being deployed today is the same approach that we have seen over the last 10 to 15 years. It’s a playbook the insurance tech industry runs on repeat: dominate one domain, then expand everywhere else. Call it a suite. Sell it as convenience. Watch your customers get trapped.
Deep expertise doesn’t clone itself across domains. When a vendor goes full-suite, they’re trading mastery for coverage. Depth for breadth. And now they’re layering AI on top of that alreadycompromised foundation. The tradeoffs don’t disappear. They stack.
GUIDEWIRE
Established the gold standard for claims: ClaimsCenter
Growth pressure, enterprise wallet share, and expansion into a full stack (policy admin, billing, underwriting, etc.)
MAJESCO
Built the gold standard for billing: Majesco Billing
Excellent billing platform. But the rest of the suite is only Average. Adequate. Not once transformative.
The result: you get claims-native AI trying to think like an underwriter. Billing logic governing policy administration intelligence. The AI knows what the vendor knows, not what you need.
THE VENDOR AI STACK IS A STRATEGIC TIMEBOMB!
The AI world outside insurance is moving at a pace no vendor can match. Foundation models today are unrecognizable compared to eighteen months ago.
Eighteen months from now, today’s capabilities will look like dial-up internet.
“This is the fastest-moving technology shift the industry has ever faced.”
Every decision your vendor makes, which models to use, how often to update them, what use cases to prioritize, what data to expose, is a decision about how fast you can move. They control your clock. Every quarter inside their closed AI ecosystem is a quarter your more nimble competitors spend pulling ahead.
“A client should not have to accept embedded AI behavior simply because it bought a modern policy administration platform. The client should be able to decide whether AI is used, where it is used, how it is governed, and when it is disabled. That is what real control looks like.”
Dimitry Zhgarev, Chief Technology Officer at CRS