Sapiens’ AI Approach

Hili Avi: Hello, welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I’m Hili, the Product Strategy and Marketing Director responsible for digital data and AI at Sapiens. I am so glad that you are out there listening! This is where we discuss the latest news, trends, and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology spectrum.

We’re well now into 2025, and it’s been firmly established that the path of the future of insurance leads through AI. AI has been helping insurers with the claims journey, underwriting, customer engagement, and much more. Sapiens incorporates this technology in our intelligence platform and in our data and digital solution. I’m so happy to invite my colleague to speak with me here today about our AI approach and how we empower insurance. Gil Trotino, he’s the Director of Product Marketing, Cloud & Portfolio. Gil brings with him over 20 years of technical and business experience and enterprise software market. He’s responsible for developing and marketing the Sapiens insurance platform approach and offering, including market analysis, practice, product roadmap, and future vision. And he’s my preferred partner for lunch.

Gil Trotino: Thank you so much, Hili! Really great to be back here on the program, especially with you. Let’s tell the audience that Hili and I joined Sapiens together and I can share that she, Hili, has 20 years of product marketing experience also in the enterprise software market. She’s responsible for developing and marketing the Sapiens data, digital, and AI strategy and offering, roadmap, and vision. And she even finds some time in between to teach in the Reichman University. So Hili, I know that you’ve researched very thoroughly the AI spectrum for the last few months. Can you share a little bit about what you know about AI in the insurance world?

Hili Avi: Absolutely. But we can’t talk about AI without mentioning its founding father, Alan Turing, who dared to ask the question, can machines think? Seventeen years later, the answer is absolutely, yes. And let’s dive into the insurance industry. AI is transforming the insurance industry across multiple dimensions, efficiency, decision-making, and of course customer experience and risk assessment, even on every back-end processes. As its core, insurance is about managing risk, and AI is helping insurance to do that with greater accuracy and speed. From what I saw in my research, the insurance industry is very, very curious about AI from building role description with the help of ChatGPT and automating employer onboarding through building marketing campaigns solely with AI. So they’re very, very invested. One of the biggest shifts we are seeing is in claim processing. Traditionally, claims can be slow and manual, but with AI-driven automation and predictive analytics, insurance can expedite claim assessment, detect fraud, and even process straightforward claims in real time through straightforward processing. GenAI adds another layer here by helping with claims documentation, decision support, and customer communication. For example, something hot from my table right now, it’s claims of critical illness. This is a very specific issue on claims. These specific claims are processed and fully managed by humans due to its complexity and sensitivity. What if we can automate that process with AI, [get a] business ruling, and the customer will get paid in 24 hours. Think how life-changing it could be to him or her. Literally life-changing. Another area where AI is making a significant impact in underwriting, AI-driven models analyze a vast amount of data from structural policy, policyholder data information to unstructured sources like medical records, social media, or even the internet of things to refine risk assessment and pricing. This is not only making underwriting faster, but more personalized. Customer engagement is also being transformed. AI-powered chatbots in a virtual assistant are streamlining interaction, answering questions about policy, and even guiding users through complex processes like claim filling. AI is not just making insurance more efficient, it’s making them more customer-centric. I can give you a personal example. By the way, last June I bought a new car, and I was waiting on the phone with my insurer for 24 minutes to update my policy with my new car. I couldn’t leave the shop with my new car because I wasn’t insured. So if they only knew about the AI! At Sapiens, we are embedding AI to help insurance harness the capability, this capability and efficiency into every touchpoint from our core system to a persona-based application like agent application or underwrite application. And the list goes on and on, whether it’s through AI, power insight, decision automation, or intelligence system integrate [ed] into core systems, we’re enabling insurance to be more agile, data-driven, and responsive to the market demands. So AI in insurance, it’s not a trend, it’s a fundamental shift of how redefining how the industry operates and at the same pace, of course, and making sure our customers stay ahead of that.

Gil Trotino: I do hope that when you buy your next car, it’ll take like 24 seconds, and not 24 minutes to issue your car insurance. But you started to touch on this, but let’s talk a little bit about AI at Sapiens. Can you share a little bit about what is the vision and what is the Sapiens strategic approach to deal with artificial intelligence?

Hili Avi: Sapiens’ vision for AI is centered around empowering insurance with intelligence, data-driven decision-making, and automation to transform the way they operate. We call that the “GenAI Everywhere.” We see AI not as a feature function, but as an enabler, deeply embedded into our platform and solution that drives efficiency, accuracy, and of course, business growth. The copilot is everywhere. It is a fact at Sapiens. Over the past year, I have researched the subject in depth, spoken with our customers, and identified the places where AI is needed and where it can provide the greatest benefit. And of course, we have [a] few pillars in our strategic approach of AI based on that research. One of them, of course, is embedded AI across our insurance lifecycle. We’re integrating AI within our core processing, of course, claim automation, underwriting, policy servicing, customer engagement. We are, by embedding AI into our workflow and streamlining operation, we’ll reduce manual efforts and improve the overall experience of both insurance and policyholders.

Think about it. How about opening [a] claim in a minute after you’ve been involved in a car accident with WhatsApp and this claim is being processed while you are driving your way home? And I’m not dreaming, this is in my roadmap. Another pillar is that data-driven insight and hyper-automation AI is not only powerful as the data is behind that. That’s why we focus on leveraging structured and unstructured data, combining with advanced analytics, to drive real-time insight. Wherever it’s detecting fraud, optimizing pricing models, or even accelerating claim processing, AI enables insurance to make faster, smarter, and more accurate decisions. Think about it, automating document management by classifying and mapping letters and documents, mapping them into relevant claim and policy, or even using AI to expedite system setup process. Again, this, I’m not dreaming, this is in my roadmap. We do believe at Sapiens that AI should be practical, actionable, and build on the real-world insurance challenges. That’s why our approach is to productize AI within our platform, making it accessible, scalable, and made to deliver tangible business value for insurance today and in the future. I just need to point out, of course, we are sure our model is aligned with AI, ethical AI principles providing governance, while maintaining customer trust.

Gil, I’ve talked too much, [so] back to you. How does Sapiens intend to integrate into our platform? Because we announced the platform last June. Can you please remind us what [it] was it all about?

Gil Trotino: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So yeah, you are right. Just June 2024, we launched the Sapiens insurance platform. Let’s remind our audience, what is it all about? So the platform actually encompasses whatever we do at Sapiens, okay? The entire Sapiens offering. And it’s more importantly, it’s illustrating the way the modular open and integrated way, and approach for us when it comes to developing and delivering business solutions to the market. So the platform includes all our core insurance capabilities across all the lines of business we support. Property and casualty, Life, Pension and Annuities, Workers’ Compensation, and more. It includes also the common technology engines like AI, data intelligence, digital engagement, automation, and more. And of course, a wide set of unified tools that we use to secure and operate our solutions. So the platform is everything we do and everything we deliver to our customers. And we like at Sapiens, for simplicity, to call the pillars of the platform by the letters A, B, C, D, where for ‘A,’ it’s all about AI. Our topic today, and automation, ‘B,’ is about the business solutions we deliver, the end-to-end, ready-to-deploy integrated solutions. ‘C’ stands for common foundations across all our solutions. And ‘D,’ finally, is about the combination of digital engagement and data, which is all about personalization.

Hili Avi: I love the digital and data! How does AI fit into our insurance platform? What is the capability we will see in the coming release of the platform?

Gil Trotino: Right? So as you just rightfully mentioned earlier, for Sapiens, AI is much more than a feature or capability that we develop or deliver. What we do is we are embedding and integrating AI and generative AI across the Sapiens platform. So what we did is we mapped the entire insurance value chain and now step by step, we are integrating those capabilities into different business processes and different personas. So it’s going to cover sales and marketing policy, admin, underwriting, claim management, customer service, everything to drive efficiency and automation. And maybe I can just name [a] few, provide some examples of what we already delivered and some things that we are going to deliver during 2025. So it’s starting with a set of 13 machine learning models which have developed, and we are integrating across multiple solutions. This is all about helping the agents mainly to make better business decisions and improve customer experience. So we talk here about generating insights about customer lifetime value recommendations for [the] next best offering, buying likelihood of customers, and more. When it comes to Generative AI, again, various tools which are integrated across the platform. One tool is called Document AI. Okay, so it’s all about enabling all the users of our solutions to summarize documents very easily, documents from different types, and chat with the documents using Q and A. So it can be the underwriter, who is quickly extracting key insights from policy documents. It can also be the claim handler, who can instantly retrieve policy details and coverage terms while processing claims, summarizing claim histories, etc. Another tool called Answer AI, also based on Generative AI, this is all about interacting with data. We have a very major component in our platform called DataSuite, which serves as our single source of truth integrating data across multiple sources. Now, Answer AI is the component that enables users for our solutions to interact with this data repository in an intelligent way, and ask all sorts of questions and queries about data so they can query about policies, claims, customer information and more. And finally, I can mention another tool, which is again, common tool, common engine. This is called Decision AI. It’s something we have for a long time. It’s the Sapiens-leading, no-code decision automation software, which enables automation and agility by applying and managing business logic, which is separated from the applications. So it can be, again, used for claim automation, underwriting automation, etc. And what we did recently, is we integrated Decision AI with Generative AI. So today, instead of the business user going to define all the business logic within our decision software today, decision can automatically generate the decision model from virtually any source written in conversational English. And this again, can be applied [to] policies, claims, and more, therefore, increase the level of automation even higher. So everything comes very nicely together. And if I can just give an example, going back to the platform, let’s talk about one of our recent business solutions. This is the small medium business solution that we just launched as part of our Winter 2024 platform release. So this solution, which includes our capabilities, but also some ecosystem partner that we use for data enrichment delivers a real-time view for the agent on customer insights and empowers the agents with the tools they need to upsell, cross-sell, and enhance customer experience. So we brought in the ML models, Generative AI, and other tools just in order to help the agents. And actually it gives this single agent the power like 10 agents, and it allows the agent, of course, to make his work much more efficient, more automated, and improve experience. Ultimately for our customers, the insurers, it’s really a great asset to unlock the small/medium business market.

Hili Avi: I remember that day when you launched the SME solution. It was a very good day.

Gil Trotino: It was, yeah, it was! And Hili, I know we can talk forever about AI, but it’s really a little bit, also, about the time. I’d like you to spend a few minutes, maybe to tell us a little bit about what’s next? So, how will AI impact the insurance domain, let’s say the next two to three years? And maybe you can tell us, what do you think, who will be the winners and losers of this innovative technology?

Hili Avi: It’s funny, because you know, Gil, every weekly meeting we have with our boss, Alex, I end it with the same sentence. While we were brainstorming here, something amazing happened out there with AI. And by the way, it’s true, it’s true! AI in the insurance industry is a reality. And over the next two or three years, we’ll see an acceleration of transformation. I do believe that in the next five years from now, there’ll be two types of companies: those who embraced AI, and those who resized. And insurance is evolving in three critical areas. Hyperautomation, as I already mentioned, enhanced risk assessment, and personalized customer interaction. Of course, hyperautomation will streamline claim processing and underwriting and of course, reduce manual intervention and accelerate straightforward processing. AI-driven insight will refine risk assessment, helping insurance price policy accurately and mitigate fraud. And on the customer front, of course, AI-powered chatbots, visual assistance and recommendation engine will make interaction more intuitive and responsive. Now, who will be the winner? Who will be the losers? The winner, as I said, will be the insurers who embrace AI strategically, not just [as] a tech add-on, but a fundamental enabler of efficiency and innovation. The GenAI everywhere, as we call it, those who invest in data-driven, decision-making, AI-powered claims automation, and embedded intelligence into the operation will gain significant competitive edge. Companies that leverage AI to enhance their customer experience, reduce cost, and drive agility will lead the market. On the other hand, insurers that will resist change, rely on outdated legacy systems, or fail to integrate AI into the digital transformation strategy risk falling behind. Hence, resizing. The industry is shifting from [a] traditional, rule-based model to an intelligence-adaptive system. Those who don’t invest in AI-powered platforms, like what we at Sapiens are building, may struggle with inefficient, increased operational costs and diminishing competitive position. Of course at Sapiens, we are focused [on] and ensuring our customer will be on the winning side of AI adoption. Our approach integrates AI across every lifecycle process, from policy administration, underwriting claims, and of course, customer engagement. We are helping them adapt scale and stay ahead of the curve in the new era of intelligence insurance.

Gil Trotino: Sounds fantastic. Hili. Thank you so much. You’ve given us so many expert insights to think about and as we know…

Hili Avi: My pleasure!

Gil Trotino: It’s an exciting time to be in the insurance domains and to see where AI can take us and take Sapiens customers over the next several years. So hopefully, you can join us again soon to comment on how it’s going! And to our listeners, thank you so much for listening. It’s only the first quarter of 2025, but we have so much more exciting content and commentary heading your way! So stay tuned and of course, 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 this podcast and stay tuned for our next episode of Sapiens Insurance 360. Bye for now!