Marcin Nowak, board member at Decerto, has 20+ years in insurance, focusing on automation, technology impact and software solutions.
getty
Eighteen years ago, a CIO at one of the largest insurance companies I worked with asked me to build "something" for his agents—he called it a "Glass Cockpit." He wanted everything on one screen—policies, claims, commissions, customer history—working together like an aircraft cockpit works with a pilot.
I'll be honest: I didn't fully understand what he meant. We were building insurance systems, not flight simulators. Nearly two decades later, I know he was describing exactly the problem our industry still hasn't solved.
According to BCG, administrative tasks consume more than half of an agent's time, while Salesforce research shows that sales professionals across all industries spend only 28% of their work week actually selling.
This isn't a staffing problem. It's a systems problem. Most carriers don't need more agents. They need them to stop doing work that software should handle. This, however, requires moving away from patching legacy systems toward a modern integration layer that can "pull" data from black boxes of years past.
Yet the industry keeps investing in tools that don't hit the root cause of the problem.
I’ve observed that insurance carriers have tried solving this problem with popular CRM platforms. Salesforce or HubSpot work for every other industry, but why not insurance?
Because insurance is different. A generic CRM doesn't understand what an endorsement is, what a renewal window means, how a commission split works or why a claims history matters when cross-selling a new product. The result? Agents still leave the CRM to check policy status in one system, claims history in another and commission statements in a third. The CRM becomes just another tab in an already overcrowded browser.
Here is the latest version of the same mistake: adding an AI chatbot and calling it a productivity tool.
In theory, it sounds great. An agent asks the chatbot a question and receives an instant answer. In practice, the chatbot isn't connected to the policy administration system, the claims platform or the commission engine. So the agent still has to copy data from somewhere else and paste it into the chat. And then, halfway through the conversation, someone from compliance points out that pasting customer personal data into an AI tool violates privacy regulations.
As a result, the company has wasted six months and a significant budget to build a tool that agents can't actually use with real customer data. I've seen this scenario more than once. AI without secure, structured access to source data is merely an expensive toy, not work support.
The mentioned CIO wasn't asking for a dashboard, nor for another system to log in to. He was asking for something much harder: a workspace where data from every source is not just displayed, but connected.
The difference matters. Showing an agent their customer's policy details next to their claims history is a dashboard. Automatically flagging that a customer who filed a property claim last month doesn't have an umbrella policy—and surfacing that as a "next-best-action"—is a cockpit.
It means the system understands context. It knows that a renewal coming up in three weeks, combined with a recent life event, is a selling opportunity. It knows that a lapsed commercial auto policy on one account is a retention risk across the entire relationship. This is intelligent information curation that, instead of flooding the agent with notifications, surfaces only the key ones that truly impact the financial result.
This isn't AI in the way the market hypes it. It's data that talks to other data.
Measuring premium written per agent tells you nothing about efficiency. How much time does an agent spend on activities that generate revenue versus those that don't? How many leads never got a follow-up because the agent was buried in paperwork? What is the actual conversion rate, and at what point do prospects drop off?
Most insurers can't answer these questions because their systems weren't designed to capture this data. And if you can't measure the problem, you can't fix it.
The insurance industry has spent billions on policy systems, claims platforms, pricing engines and now AI. But it has chronically underinvested in the one place where all of that technology is supposed to come together: the agent's daily workflow.
That CIO was right in 2008. The agent needs a cockpit, not another instrument to monitor. It took me 20 years and a few failed approaches to fully understand what he meant. We must remember, however, that technology is half the success—the other half is leading agents through the change process so they learn to trust a system that thinks one step ahead of them. The technology to build it exists today. The question is whether insurers will finally prioritize the people who actually talk to their customers.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。