Insurance and Technology Insights from sessions held between Oct. 14 - 15, 2025, at InsurTech Connect Las Vegas.
Insurance innovation reshaping the industry
In the opening keynote, "Technology as a Catalyst: Building a Culture of Progress and Innovation at Liberty Mutual," held Oct. 15, 2025, Liberty Mutual Insurance chairman and CEO, Tim Sweeney, shared his insights into the key innovations and trends transforming the insurance industry.
"Innovation has to be both internal and external. Invest in emerging technologies and companies adding value to the insurance value chain…" said Sweeney. "Innovation isn't just nice to have, it's a must have."
He identified five risks that both excite and worry him; climate and weather patterns are changing and getting more severe; AI integration and adoption; legal system abuse and the resulting increase in premiums; future mobility, including autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles; and cyber risks.
Some of his takeaways for the audience included to focus on the demand side –not supply–and to not fall in love with solutions that don't have problems to solve. Sweeney also recommended to take on a partnership mindset, rather than a vendor mindset, to look for partners and not just solutions. As the industry is heavily regulated, it takes time for regulators to "catch up" to innovations, and he shared that some "great ideas" aren't ready yet, or that regulation is not ready for them yet.
The future of AI and human producers
Despite AI hype and predictions of producer decline, human producers remain essential, said Drew Aldrich, managing partner at Viewpoint Ventures, at the panel "AI and the Future of Human Producers" on Oct.14, 2025.
According to Aldrich, there are five key areas of consumer trust in AI to consider: competence, empathy, integrity, accountability and shared risk. While AI excels in competence, consumers are less likely to fully trust an AI tool over a producer in terms of empathy and integrity. Trust in accountability hinges on the institution behind the interface, Aldrich explained, and trust around shared risk depends on the business model, not the tech.
"The consumer is putting most of their trust on the producer– a bit on the insurance company, but mostly on the human producer…" said Aldrich. "What we find is that trust ties to the salesperson first, and then the company behind it."
Aldrich also shared three areas of initiatives that carriers should consider deploying: to automate workflows with AI, to unlock adjacent opportunities with AI-led production and to defend producer-reliant segments vulnerable to AI.
AI in underwriting
"Our industry has never seen a bigger disruptor than generative AI," said Amit Gupta, VP of global insurance services at Capgemini, in the session "A New Era for Underwriting: AI as a Competitive Advantage" held Oct. 14, 2025. In the panel portion of the session, insurance professionals shared how their organizations have implemented AI tools in underwriting and the impact of AI on their organizations.
Jenn Mastalerz, head of financial lines and surety operations, specialties, Zurich North America, shared that AI tools in underwriting improve new business intake processes, seeing the greatest impact in data extraction and account summarization.
The Hanover Insurance Group's VP of business architecture and innovation, Adam Hoover, said that the insurer's play early on was to structure unstructured data, with a focus on document ingestion and triage. This improved the processing time overall, enabling prioritization in quoting that resulted in an increase in binds.
Margo Giles, CEO of Irys Insurtech, shared that in her professional experience in commercial insurance brokerages, the first area in which she saw a true return on investment from AI was in document data, where information was pulled from PDFs or images and aggregated into data based off of AI-produced summaries. On the agency side, Giles explained that this type of data can be used across carriers and dynamically processed by AI to help brokers and agents with supplemental business questions.
Personalization and customer experience
Panelists in the session, '"From One-Size-Fits-All to One-in-a-Million: The New Era of Hyper-Personalized Insurance," held Oct. 15, 2025, discussed how new research techniques can enable hyper personalization and how insurers can use data-driven insights to deliver education and empowerment, as well as how to build trust with consumers.
John Almasan, senior managing director and global head of AI and emerging tech at TIAA, said that the organization believes it is very important to use generative AI to create a hyper-personalized experience.
"In today's world, we have our multi-generation people that are either preparing to retire, or some of them are near retirement and some are retired. How do you engage with every generation in a different way, but also make it meaningful and very specific and also customized for their needs? That's why it's so important now, in the age of generative AI, to use these technologies in ways that you otherwise couldn't," stated Almasan.
Andrea Collins, Hippo CMO, said that because consumer expectations are going to change and elevate over the next few years, it is important to meet their expectations with some level of personalization and integration. Collins also advised insurance companies to experiment in new ways when it comes to personalization.
"[Personalization] is not necessary everywhere, but in insurance, particularly, we have a huge opportunity…" stated Collins. "My advice would certainly be to test and learn. I think a lot of people are waiting for things to be perfect before they start diving into those tools that are building their platforms or visiting and meeting with AI companies."
