Revolutionizing Insurance: Sapiens’ Next-Generation AI Platform
With Sapiens’ recently launched, next-generation, comprehensive AI-powered insurance platform, customers benefit from the latest innovative technologies to make smarter business decisions and increase automation across all sectors. Sapiens’ Gil Trotino, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud & Portfolio, joins host Pat Ryan, Marketing Director at Sapiens, to introduce the new platform and explain how its pioneering software leverages digital engagement, data intelligence, and increased operational efficiency to deliver greater value in today’s fast-paced world of insurtech.
Pat Ryan|Gil Trotino
Pat Ryan: Hello and welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 Podcast. I’m your host, Pat Ryan, Marketing Director at Sapiens, and I’m so pleased that you’re out there listening to us. This is where we discuss the latest news, trends, and issues from across the insurance solutions and the technology spectrum. We have a very exciting episode in store for you today, where we’ll be talking about Sapiens’ new, next-generation AI-based insurance platform, which accelerates innovation and empowers insurers to grow, differentiate, and stay ahead. With us today to discuss the new platform and set the surrounding stage for it is our own Gil Trotino, Sapiens’ Director of Product Marketing, Cloud & Portfolio. Gil is responsible for developing the Sapiens insurance platform approach and offering, including market analysis practices, product roadmap, and future vision, and has over 20 years of technical and business experience in the enterprise software market. Gil, welcome to the podcast! So great to have you here today.
Gil Trotino: Thanks for having me, Pat. Great to be here with you.
Pat Ryan: So Gil, before we start talking about the Sapiens new platform, let’s talk about the insurance industry’s current landscape. There’s certainly a lot of discussion around expense management that’s very top of mind for insurers, but I also see this continuous explosion of data analytics and technology that can drive innovation. What are the key drivers of change in our market today that you are seeing that insurers need to be prepared for?
Gil Trotino: Well, Pat, let’s focus on three primary market drivers that we have explored. I would say it’s about differentiation, technology, and cost. As we know, the insurance industry is undergoing rapid change, right? It’s Insuretech, startups, big tech, new market entrants, and increasing customer demands. This means that insurance needs to expand to new markets. They need to offer more diverse and tailored solutions and be able to differentiate in a very competitive market. We know that customers today expect personalized, convenient, and transparent services, accessible anytime, anywhere, through any channel. They want flexibility in their products and coverage options. On the other hand, agents need simple digital solutions to manage large books of business and serve their clients seamlessly. So we know that modern systems enable data-driven, customer-centric processes like digital underwriting, automated claims, and self-service portals. AI and machine learning are revolutionizing the operations. They’re improving customer experiences, reducing costs, and increasing fraud detection. And of course, Gen AI, right? The latest buzzword promises even greater efficiency and innovation, but ultimately don’t forget, insurers as we know, are also very focused on reducing total cost of ownership and simplifying their daily operations. So it’s all about balancing the cutting-edge technology with practical cost-effective solutions, if this makes sense.
Pat Ryan: Yeah, it does make sense. You covered quite a few things there and there’s a lot for us to wrap our heads around. How do carriers boil the ocean on this? How do they address these challenges that you’re talking about?
Gil Trotino: So, well, let’s think about this using three buckets, and we call them growth, modernization, and optimization. And in a more action-oriented terms, let’s talk about these three factors, right? So one is the need to grow your business. This is about how to reduce time to market. This is about creating new products and being able to expand into new lines of business and product lines. The second factor is the need to modernize your business. As an insurer, you need to do it right now. It’s more about leveraging advanced technologies and data, so you can have the access to the right information to help you to make the smart business decisions to operate your business. And the third one is about how to optimize and reduce cost and simplify operations. This is where we talk about things like hyper-automation, which is basically taking automation and apply it in every phase of the insurance value chain, customer acquisition, underwriting policy, servicing, claim processing, and more. So these are the three buckets: growth, modernization, and optimization.
Pat Ryan: Yeah, that’s great. I love those three elements that you referenced there, growth, modernization, optimization, those are obviously key elements to any operation for an insurance organization. So those are great comments. Let’s shift gears a little bit. Partners, as we know, play a huge role in harnessing all of this. So tell me a little bit about Sapiens approach as a global technology partner.
Gil Trotino: Okay, so again, it comes down to several points. As you well know, Sapiens is uniquely positioned as a global solution provider. We have global expertise, but still we have also the ability to tailor our solutions and to make a local execution. And we have a breadth of solutions. We cover all the geographies. We cover many lines of businesses and product lines, and we support the entire set of insurance business processes. We have the expertise both in the industry and technology, but we have learned that in order for us to adopt innovation quicker, the best way for us is to use common technology engines such as digital applications such as data and analytics, AI, et cetera, and take these tools and adopt them across the various solutions that we develop in a consistent way, in a more efficient way. We also learned that by integrating selected capabilities across core insurance functionality, the technology engines and our partner ecosystem, we can basically build end-to-end solutions for our customers, and of course we do need to remember we cannot do it alone, right?
We do need to bring in also the ecosystem of partners to add value and to complement our solutions. So when we designed this new platform, basically we were thinking about six key principles or six technology pillars. The first one was about personalized digital engagement. This is about ensuring that all the different users of our solutions get very consistent, personalized, great experience across all digital channels. This applies to the agents, the brokers, the employers, the administrators, et cetera. Then we have a second pillar around providing robust data and analytic suite of solutions that leverage AI and machine learning and empowers insurers to get a holistic view of their business, to take the data, transfer the data into insights and make these data-driven decisions. The third element is about automation. Take AI, ML, and Gen AI capabilities to drive new levels of automation across the value chain. The fourth one is about taking all these solutions and put them on the cloud. So native SaaS solutions that will provide the business flexibility and the agility that our customers need. The fifth element is about unified operability tools. So one set of tools that are being used to install, to maintain, to upgrade, to secure, and to monitor our solutions. This is about reducing TCO, and the final one is once again, opening the platform for the ecosystem to add value and to complement our offering.
Pat Ryan: That’s great. So when you think about, certainly those six key principles, explain why all these aspects or strengths of the platform are such game changers. I mean, what sets the new platform apart from our previous products?
Gil Trotino: So what I described earlier, these were more focused on the technology and the technical principles and pillars of the platform, but this is more about the how, right? For our business users and customers, the platform enables them basically to get end-to-end package solutions, which integrate selected capabilities across our core functionality and technology engines. This solution then can be complimented by the ecosystem of partners and already includes a lot of pre-configured industry content and knowledge that we have built into the platform. Maybe let’s take an example, right? Let’s take a P&C insurance company that wishes to enter the small medium business, what we call SMB, or in other regions, we call SME, small medium enterprise. So such an SMB or SME solution should include very specific tailored capabilities, which are focused on this specific needs of this specific segment. And this may include, for example, an SMB quote and buy journey template that we would like to include in this solution that will have also some data enrichment capabilities that will enable this insurer to accelerate the onboarding of new customers, right?
It may also include a suggestion of customer discounts during the quote and buy process. This can be based on a propensity to buy [an] AI model. Another AI model can talk about [the] next best offering. Another thing can be the underwriting automation, which we apply through a decision management engine and so on and so forth. By integrating these capabilities across the different layers of the platform and then packaging them as an end-to-end business solution, this, we believe, is the biggest venue that the platform delivers to our customers. And the same approach that I just described for P&C can be applied also for different other lines of business, like life and annuities, workers’ comp, et cetera. Make sense?
Pat Ryan: Yeah, it does. There’s a lot of capabilities in one platform. Absolutely. So I know you’ve been working on this for quite a bit. Why do you think now is the right time for this announcement? What’s kind of prompted this development?
Gil Trotino: Yeah, interesting. No, adopting a platform concept for us internally at Sapiens, it’s probably the only way that we as a solution provider are being able to maintain our market leadership and adopting innovation quick enough to keep our market leadership. So we have a very broad offering of solutions as we just explained, and if we wish to adopt things like AI, GenAI quicker, we truly believe that we need to change the way we develop and deliver solutions. And these insights basically triggered us to start this platform journey already a few years ago. Now we take it to the next level, we expand it to cover more product lines, to cover more technologies, and we decided to officially announce it to the market and fully commit to it. And we have already proven this layered open and modular approach is already working. It’s already delivering bigger and value to our customers, so why not take it to the next level?
Pat Ryan: Yeah, that’s great. Certainly, there’s been a great deal of hype around the platform here at Sapiens, so [I’m] certainly familiar with what you’re talking about. Can you explain some of the internal adjustments that we’re making to transition to a fully-fledged platform organization that ensures customers that Sapiens can become or will become an extension of their own team?
Gil Trotino: Sure, Pat. As I said, it’s much more than just the packaging or positioning exercise. It’s also about even the way we structure our organization internally, our R&D organization for example. It’s about how we develop and test solutions before we deliver them to the market, how we release our software. So for example, these end-to-end business solutions I just mentioned. It means we need to apply end-to-end testing for each business package and use case, including the integration of the third-party partner technology. It is also some implication on the way we deliver and plan our roadmaps across the core capabilities and technology engines such as data intelligence, digital engagement, AI, et cetera. And even our delivery organizations are going through major transformation in the way they align the project delivery methodologies and many more. So it’s a lot about changing a lot of internal processes and actually the way we operate as a company.
Pat Ryan: As we’ve been talking for the past 10 minutes or so, I just keep coming back from this analogy in my head. I’m a big analogy guy. Let me know if this fits the right way. I’m thinking about Legos, the old building blocks that we had as we were kids. There are all these different Lego pieces and colors, and Sapiens has all the blocks for our customers to have success, and it gives our customers the options to develop their own best composition of blocks to be competitive. So I also think it’s about the ingredients of the blocks themselves. Being confident in the ingredients is a very important element because it leads to reliability that everything fits together without friction. Does that make sense? Is that a reasonable analogy?
Gil Trotino: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great analogy, Pat. Let’s take Gen AI as an example, okay? We have mapped more than 30 different Gen AI use cases across the insurance value chain and have started to develop them. Some are outbound focused, so to optimize the value chain for our customers, and some are more inbound, focusing on boosting operational efficiency. One AI, one Gen AI use case, for example, which we have built is around claims automation. So it’s actually taking a customer’s document with very complex claim rules and use AI to automatically configure claim decisioning rules. These rules are then executed automatically by our decision management engine, which is a no code business rule engine, which is part of the platform foundations and which we are adopting across many of our solutions. So the same Gen AI functionality and decision automation engine, these are exactly the Lego building blocks that you used in your analogy. We apply them across different solutions. So we develop them once and then they can be vetted and can be applied in solutions for P&C, for Life, for Workers’ Comp, et cetera.
Pat Ryan: That’s great, Gil. It’s certainly an exciting time at Sapiens. I think an exciting time for our customers, they’ll be able to take advantage of this new platform in ways that they probably hadn’t considered in the past. We’re at the start, right? Will you come back in a year or so and provide us [with] some use cases on how clients are doing?
Gil Trotino: Sure, sure. Pat, I’d be happy to. But just for you to know, we have already quite many customers who are already deploying the platform modules and are already getting value from this approach. So we are very, very, very confident with it. People can already contact us for existing case studies, and we are happy to share references and some very, very nice success stories.
Pat Ryan: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Gil. You’ve given us so much detailed information on how this new modular platform will help insurance grow and optimize their business via automated business decisions, unified data, predictive analytics. You spoke a lot about AI-driven engines, and I think our talk today has been a great introduction to the new platform and what it can achieve for our customers. So Gil Trotino, thank you so much for joining us today. To our listeners, as always, thank you so much for tuning in. We love hearing from you. So if you have comments, and if you’d like to follow us on social media, please reach out to us on our channels and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We’ve got more coming up. So stay tuned for our next episode of Sapiens Insurance 360.
