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WEBINAR | What Nobody’s Telling You About Agentic AI

Last updated: Webinar Policy Administration System

GenAI investment in life insurance has nearly doubled from 2025 to 2026. So why are most production use cases still stuck in efficiency mode?

“The conversation is moving from, ‘Can we use GenAI?’ to, ‘How do we operationalize decisioning through agentic systems?’ — and that’s where the reality starts to become clear.”

Fabio Sarrico, Global Head, Celent

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In this session from the Equisoft Accelerate series, Celent's Senior Analyst Fabio Sarrico and Equisoft AVP of Product Management Ghassan Karam cut through the noise to examine what's actually happening with agentic AI in life insurance and what it takes to get from proof-of-concept to production.

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Click here to watch the full webinar.

From the architecture trap that quietly limits most artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, to the data wall that blocks decisioning use cases, to the change management challenges that derail even technically sound deployments, this webinar covers what the industry still isn't saying out loud, and what you need to hear before your next AI investment.

Our guest panelists

Session agenda

  • Generative AI (GenAI) investment reality check: why 92% of insurers are investing, but most use cases are still optimization, not decisioning
  • The architecture trap: why embedding AI inside your core system creates hidden strategic constraints
  • AI-native vs. AI-ready: where intelligence should live in your ecosystem
  • Closing the proof-of-concept-to-production gap: drift management, explainability, and change management
  • The real data barrier: governing the 85% of unstructured data insurers aren't using

What you’ll learn

  • Why 92% of North American life insurers are investing in GenAI, but most are still optimizing static processes rather than transforming how they assess and act on risk
  • What the "architecture trap" is, why embedding AI inside core systems creates hidden strategic constraints, and how the most forward-thinking insurers are designing around it
  • The difference between AI-enabled and AI-native ecosystems, and why intelligence increasingly needs to live outside the system of record to drive real-time decisioning
  • Why the proof-of-concept-to-production gap isn't just a technical problem: what drift management, explainability, and human-in-the-loop design actually look like at scale
  • The three-stage model (assess, predict, execute) that moves AI from cost reduction to revenue growth and the data infrastructure decisions you need to make today to get there
  • Practical advice for insurance executives on where to start: from governance ownership and employee adoption to vendor selection criteria for production-ready agentic AI

Key insights from this session

GenAI investment is real, but most of the industry is still in efficiency mode.

Celent’s 2026 CIO survey shows GenAI’s share of AI/ML budgets has doubled year over year, and 92% of North American life insurers are investing or planning to within two years. But the majority of production use cases — document summarization, submission triage, internal co-pilots — are optimization plays. They don’t change how insurers assess or act on risk. That shift from efficiency to decisioning is where the real transformation begins.

The architecture trap: why embedding AI in your core system is a strategic mistake.

Many insurers introduce AI into environments never designed to support it. When AI is embedded inside a system of record, it inherits that system’s limitations — batch processing, static lifecycle triggers, no real-time response. The result is a probabilistic AI operating inside a deterministic environment. The insurers getting this right are designing AI to live outside the policy admin core, connected through event-driven architecture and governed by clear human-in-the-loop logic.

AI-native vs. AI-ready: where intelligence lives matters more than whether AI is present.

An AI-native policy admin system (PAS) is a meaningful upgrade, but it’s still fundamentally a system of record: built for stability and consistency, not adaptation. An AI-ready ecosystem treats the PAS as the heart (the system of truth) while decision-making moves to a cognitive layer outside the core. That intelligence layer can observe signals, respond continuously, and evolve over time without contaminating the deterministic logic of the core.

The POC-to-production gap is not just technical; it’s organizational.

Most insurers can build a compelling proof of concept. The hard part is making it reliable at scale: measuring drift over time, managing model versions, building override logic, and structuring the feedback loops that make AI systems improve. Just as important is managing employee perception. If your workforce believes AI is replacing them, their feedback will be guarded — and the system will never improve. Shadow deployment, cohort testing, and human-assisted recommendation are the gradual approach that actually works.

The real data barrier isn’t availability; it’s the 85% you aren’t governing.

Most insurers govern roughly 15% of their data: structured records from core systems. The other 85% — documents, emails, call logs, historical decisions — is unstructured, ungoverned, and inaccessible. Moving from efficiency use cases to growth use cases requires solving that gap. Insurers serious about AI-driven decisioning need to think about data lake architecture, unstructured data governance, and how they handle PII and PHI in an agentic environment.

About our expert speakers

Fabio Sarrico, Senior Analyst – APAC, EMEA, & LATAM, Celent

Fabio Sarrico is a senior analyst in Celent's insurance practice, based in London. He covers global insurance technology trends across life, P&C, and specialty lines, with research spanning core system modernization, underwriting, distribution, and fraud prevention. He contributes to Celent's global coverage across Latin America, EMEA, and APAC.

Ghassan Karam, ASA, ACIA – AVP, Product Management, Equisoft

Ghassan Karam, AVP of Product Management at Equisoft, is an ASA-accredited actuary with 13+ years of expertise in insurance core systems, actuarial consulting, and InsurTech. He leads strategy for cloud-based PAS, back-office productivity, and AI-driven analytics, modernizing insurer operations with cutting-edge technology.

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