With AI, Does Insurance Still Need a Middle Office?

New Research on the Future of Insurance Operations

New research on the future of insurance operationsInfrasAI partnered with Datos Insights on new research examining a growing challenge for insurance carriers: AI is making individual tasks faster, but those productivity gains are not always translating into lower expense ratios or operating costs. The New Basis of Competition: How AI Will Reshape Insurance Operating Models was authored by Chris Eberly and Jack Krantz of Datos Insights, with additional insights from Nelson Lee, Founder & CEO of InfrasAI, and explores what needs to change for AI to create structural - not just incremental - advantage. 

The research points to a major source of hidden cost: coordination work. Handoffs, routing, approvals, status tracking, exception handling, and reconciliation keep insurance processes moving, but often add little direct customer value. In claims, research cited in the paper finds that value-added work can represent less than 5% of total processing time, with the rest consumed by waiting and coordination overhead.

For InfrasAI, the opportunity goes beyond simply automating another task. AI Agents can reimagine how work gets done end to end - connecting systems, data, rules, and decisions while reducing the manual coordination around them. As the paper puts it: eliminate before automating.

Download the Research Paper

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