The insurance industry has spent nearly three decades waiting for a technological revolution. Straight-through processing, predictive underwriting, and dynamic pricing have been tomorrow’s promises for so long that many stopped expecting tomorrow to arrive. With AI, we believe it’s here today.
At the 2026 ReSource Pro Summit, more than 300 insurance professionals gathered around a single, urgent theme: Capture the Shift. The message from ReSource Pro CEO Dan Epstein Tagger at the opening keynote was candid and practical, not a pitch for a particular technology, but an honest look at what it takes to make AI work in insurance. And it starts somewhere most organizations are overlooking.
Watch the full keynote from the ReSource Pro Summit 2026 here
Are you asking the right question?
Most AI conversations in insurance begin the same way: What can AI do for us? It sounds both natural and like an energetic starting point. But as this year’s keynote argued, it may be precisely the wrong question.
Consider the data. Roughly 90% of insurance organizations have AI pilots running today, 22% have live deployments in production, but only 7% have successfully scaled those projects enterprise-wide. According to research from the Boston Consulting Group, the biggest barriers are not technological but arise from people and processes. Teams are not set up to manage AI, and operations are not structured to let it succeed.
The more productive question is: What does AI need from us?
Operational readiness is AI readiness
Think of AI as a brilliant but highly literal analyst. Give that analyst clean data, standardized processes, and clear decision logic; and strong performance follows. Give that same analyst inconsistent workflows and undocumented rules, and results are equally consistent, just in the wrong direction. That’s because AI does not fix fragmentation, it scales it.
Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain, has described AI as “the new electricity.” And it’s not just big tech companies seeing this metaphor in action. When factories first adopted electricity, they kept their existing layouts and saw little improvement. Only after redesigning their operations around electricity did meaningful gains follow. The same dynamic is playing out in insurance today with AI.
Operational readiness and AI readiness are not two different goals, but one and the same.
The messy middle
For anyone in insurance operations, this will be familiar. The industry needs to navigate what ReSource Pro calls “the messy middle,” a system of fragmented workflows, tribal knowledge, and process variation that runs far deeper than most organizations realize until they try to train an AI system on it.
“In insurance, 95% accuracy is a failing grade. It means a five-point risk to compliance and to your business.”
Dan Epstein Tagger, CEO, ReSource Pro
Across several hundred of our clients, ReSource Pro supports approximately 300 core workflows. Those workflows have spawned 70,000 versions and an estimated 7 million variation points. For example, a single employee benefits task can require 500 pages of documentation for a 15-minute procedure.
This variation has understandable roots. Insurance is a client-centric profession, and the attentiveness that builds lasting client relationships also produces highly customized processes. That orientation is a genuine strength, but it creates a real challenge when AI needs consistency and documented rules to function reliably at scale. Zach Hansen and Sivan Iram showed how ReSource Pro is addressing this historical challenge to put AI into action to address these complications with live demos.
Watch Zach’s demo to see how these challenges play out in practice
Watch Sivan Iram’s demo for a closer look at AI readiness in action
A practical path forward: Integrate, optimize, digitize
ReSource Pro’s answer is a three-pillar framework: Integrate, Optimize, Digitize (IOD). Integration means standardizing workflows and centralizing functions. Optimization involves streamlining processes and building functional teams. Digitization covers the data layer: cleansing records, establishing governance, and setting up the platforms AI requires to operate responsibly.
This foundation not only gets companies ready to build AI into their frameworks but also generates real returns before any AI is deployed. Organizations working through the IOD framework consistently see productivity gains, stronger client retention, and improved business outcomes from the process improvements alone.
AI decision-making clarity: From black box to crystal box
At ReSource Pro, operational readiness is not only about standardizing workflows and cleansing data. It also requires that AI systems make their reasoning visible. When AI handles insurance decisions — renewals, submissions, compliance checks — those decisions must be auditable. Regulators, clients, and internal teams need to understand not just what the AI decided but why. That means documented decision traces, expert review at critical judgment points, and governance structures that keep the AI informed as business rules change. Without this layer of transparency, even a well-trained AI becomes a liability.
“Instead of a black box, we need a crystal box that we can see through to understand what happened and what course corrections are needed going forward.”
Dan Epstein Tagger, CEO, ReSource Pro
For more details on how ReSource Pro orchestrates AI, explore our AI Blueprint.
The shift is here
AI-native brokers, MGAs, and carriers are entering the market. Established organizations cannot simply discard their systems and start over, nor do they need to. Incumbents own their client relationships, retain roughly 90% of accounts each year, and carry decades of subject matter expertise that no new entrant can replicate quickly. The path to protecting those advantages runs through operational readiness.
The organizations that will capture the shift are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced technology. They are the ones who have built the foundation to use it well.
Watch the full ReSource Pro Opening Keynote here
As we look ahead to the 2027 ReSource Pro Summit, we want to hear from you. What session topics would your team like to see or present on?
Submit your session ideas for the 2027 ReSource Pro Summit here
