The opportunities are too vast to stand and watch: change leaders need to move fast, or they will find themselves on the wrong side of history
by James Hannay, Chief Revenue Officer, Sapiens
The IT sector may have a bad rep for overselling its products, but there can be no doubt that the impacts of AI and machine learning are seismic. And today, with agentic AI being used to re-engineer every activity, insurance, like other vertical sectors, will never be the same again. The question you should ask yourself, reading this, is: ‘How fast can my organisation embrace these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities?’
To boil down what is happening here: the net effect of agentic AI is to make processes outcome-based. When an insurer desires a particular result, the AI figures out a process to achieve that result and recruits an army of like-minded Agents to create an efficient result. This applies across the gamut of insurance activities from underwriting to fraud detection to claims processing to actuarial activities. Processes are not merely tweaked but reduced dramatically: from weeks or months to minutes or milliseconds.
And the benefits don’t stop at speed. Insurance activities become consistent rather than erratic, error-free rather than error-strewn, repeatable rather than one-off, dynamically improving rather than static at a point in time. Our robo companions don’t have moods or bad days; they aren’t desirous of holidays or prone to illness. We train them, but they learn faster than human beings, and their skills can excel even the best flesh-and-bone workers. So, our outcomes aren’t just rapid and reliable but also more valuable.
The role of the human-in-the-loop is to provide essential guardrails, goes the common refrain. But it’s worth noting that even in those areas where we humans are thought for now to excel and provide differentiation – creativity, anomaly detection and so on – we are not all we are cracked up to be. AI agents can consume field guides and follow security and governance processes and white books better than we can. And they can even build the guardrails themselves.
That removal of the human factor may be alien and scary to many of us, but it is the route to achieving industrial-scale automation and accelerated time to results. And over time, to use an automotive comparison, as with everything from the internal combustion engine to GPS mapping and soon with driverless vehicles, we begin to trust the process. We don’t care how it works under the bonnet or in the gearbox or on-board sensors, nor do we want to look into every detail as to how results are achieved.
Ready to go?
Insurance is a segment steeped in history and in some ways is considered a conservative one. But the time to act is now because if you try to polish to perfection, you will never implement. AI learns rapidly, so every day that slides by now will slow the chances of rapid success in the future.
Gotchas and bumps on the road to the AI sunlit uplands? Of course they exist. Inaccessible data in separate systems where agents are not permitted access is an issue to be sure. Hence, the need to build new data lakes that act as pools of training data. But you can’t treat implementing AI as just another IT project, or you will never go live and be able to leverage the full potential it has to offer.
Corporate culture, old rules and regs, the Not Invented Here syndrome and fears over what happens to internal empires and waterfall methodology for continuous improvement…. All of these are enemies to progress. There’s a reason that people say IT is where AI goes to die.
Insurance leaders today are astonished by the speed of deployment and what they can do to shake up their organisations. Every company wants to put AI into action, and every version update to AI is a step change. They just need some best practices and use cases, but they don’t need either as much as the gumption to get on with it. This is a market that rewards early adopters. It’s not like the internet or e-commerce, where the pioneers ended up, in some cases, with arrows in their backs. There will be no second-mover advantage to be gained in the AI Age.
CIO = Career Is Over?
And if you are an insurance CIO or other IT leader, what is your future in the AI age? In short, CIOs need to be transformers. Often, I have observed, the progressives carry a business card that says Chief Data Officer or Chief Digital Officer. It’s a detail, but a telling one. In a sector that is moving to become outcome-based, leaders need to be outcome-based too: they must be change agents who act without fear.
And specialist knowledge still has value. An AI risk is agents that go rogue. The identity management layer will be key for corralling agents, deploying them and understanding what they are unearthing.
Ultimately, the IT leader here needs to be the conductor or orchestrator. They need to learn from examples where companies reacted to technology-enabled change (Sears, Blockbuster and so on) and drive through change. They can lead the charge to new front-ends where voice and text-based search and form-filling accelerate end-user processes, too. And they should build a CX that is based on research into what staff and customers really need.
But more than anything else, and this goes for any executive or staff member, they need to commit to action. Now.
About James Hannay
James Hannay joined Sapiens in December 2025. James is a global transformation executive recognized for scaling commercial organizations and accelerating revenue growth. With experience leading global GTM strategy, sales, marketing, and P&L operations across the globe, James has built high-performing, customer-centric teams for both multinationals and high-growth VC/PE-backed software companies.
Previously, he served as Chief Growth Officer at HCL Software, where he was responsible for net new business, existing customers and recurring revenue worldwide. Before that, he served as EVP & GM at Alight Solutions, where he revitalized a declining sales organization to deliver growth and investor confidence ahead of the company’s public listing. Prior to that, he held senior GM roles at Infor, leading cloud transformation and major enterprise SaaS migrations, including record-breaking strategic wins. With a unique blend of international commercial and management experience, James has led enterprise software and cloud functions across Europe, the US and APAC. He is based in the US.
About Sapiens
Sapiens International Corporation (N.V.) provides the best-in-class, agentic AI-powered SaaS platform for insurance. Driven by agile intelligence, Sapiens keeps insurers one step ahead in an industry defined by uncertainty.
Our integrated, end-to-end platform equips insurers with tailored, last-inch functionality – enabling hyper-relevant experiences and better outcomes at scale. Serving over 600 insurance companies in more than 30 countries, we cover every risk landscape – spanning property & casualty; life, wealth & retirement; workers’ compensation; and reinsurance. Recognized by industry analysts and selected for the Microsoft Top 100 Partnership Program, we’re committed to championing customer success and advancing what’s possible.
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