The Equal team attended Insurtech Connect 2025 in Las Vegas — the largest annual gathering of innovators and investors in insurance. As always, we came away with a clearer sense of how the industry is evolving and what themes insiders are most excited about.
Continuing last year’s trend, the conversation has shifted decisively toward the impact of AI and agentic workflows. The “pie-in-the-sky” promises of a few years ago have given way to real deployments, tangible productivity gains, and a sense that the next wave of automation is already here.
Below are a few themes that stood out most.
1. Agentic AI Meets the Data Reality Check
The most striking idea circulating both in sessions and on the expo floor is that fully automated, end-to-end insurance workflows could arrive within a decade.
Instead of logging into policy admin, claims, and billing systems separately, AI agents will soon orchestrate workflows across data lakes and APIs automatically. Carriers are articulating a vision for substantially increasing the productivity and efficiency of their workforces and driving expense ratios lower.
But speakers at the conference also talked about the reality that messy data kills automation. Insurance data remains scattered across legacy systems, which is often decades old, and in inconsistent formats of variable (often low) quality. One carrier CTO spoke about how they now spend more on data migration and cleanup than on new product development because they’ve realized data readiness is the single biggest enabler of AI. Data infrastructure is a new competitive moat. Carriers that modernize their data fastest (and the startups that help them to do so) may unlock agentic workflows their peers can’t match.
2. AI Sentiment Has Turned a Corner
The mood around AI has clearly shifted from cautious optimism to measurable confidence. The narrative around incremental or no benefit from AI deployment seems much diminished compared to prior years. Speakers talked about viable use cases for AI including: Mining insights from unstructured data; organizing historical claims information; enhancing underwriting models; digitizing decades of paper archives; and many other prospective innovation areas. Insurers are not using GenAI “just for the sake of it,” and instead, the focus is on data quality, retrieval, and decision support. There is an expectation that investments can meaningfully move the needle on performance over the near term.
3. Incrementalism Is Dead
Insurtech competition has fundamentally changed. Startups aren’t just competing with each other, but also with incumbents that have made significant transformation investments. One founder said their toughest competitor on a recent deal wasn’t another startup but a century-old carrier with a rebuilt tech stack and deep capital reserves.
Being “digital-first” is no longer a differentiator when leading carriers have made massive investments to enable digital distribution and product development. To win, new entrants need materially better loss ratios, distinctive products, or truly transformative workflows. The days of incremental improvement are over. The next cohort of large challengers will be those tackling the largest, most complex, and most transformative opportunities in insurance. We are excited to see new entrants running towards complex risks with new solutions and taking big swings that weren’t palatable just a few years ago.
4. User Experience and Broker Efficiency Matter Again
With workflows being reimagined, UX and ease of doing business are back in focus. One broker put it bluntly: “If you make it 25% easier for me to do business with you, I’ll place 25% more business.” Carriers are recognizing that friction in quoting, binding, and servicing directly costs them deals. The most successful players are building integrated platforms that collapse multiple workflows and drive response times from days to hours or less. It’s no longer just about higher commissions, but about respecting brokers’ time.
5. Climate Risks are Front & Center
Following years of worsening natural catastrophe risks and in the wake of the LA wildfires in Q1, adapting to climate risks was a key topic at this year’s conference. On one hand, carriers are looking for new solutions to managing changing physical risk profiles and to contain volatile loss ratios in climate-exposed regions. On the other hand, they are looking for ways to profitably write new business in emerging growth areas like energy and infrastructure development, where limited access to affordable insurance creates bottlenecks. Finding solutions to aggregated losses and making high-value assets more resilient is top of mind for insurers across the industry. At Equal, we’ve written about this category repeatedly, and we expect it to continue to be an urgent area for industry innovation to reduce risks and tap into new premiums.
6. The Specialty Underwriting Boom Continues
The growth of specialty underwriting and alternative capacity remains one of the most dynamic stories in insurance. We believe the industry is seeing accelerating migration of underwriter talent from large carriers to MGAs and new platforms built specifically for complex risks. These professionals are drawn by the chance to write niche lines that weren’t feasible or profitable inside legacy organizations.
The insurance industry has moved from talking about change to executing on it. AI productivity gains are already reshaping operations and drawing board-level attention. Talent and capital continue to flow toward efficient specialty MGAs, while connected, AI-enabled experiences are bringing a step-change in user experience within reach. We expect the pace of innovation to keep accelerating, and we’re excited to see where it leads over the coming year.
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