Legacy Tech Trips Up AI Push in Life Insurance

Old tech makes it harder for life insurers to deploy AI

Longevity trends are reshaping product design while customers push for digital speed. The catch: decades of policy admin and paper-based processes make AI harder to deploy where it matters.

• Product shifts ripple into underwriting, servicing, and data needs
• Multiple legacy platforms must be reconciled before AI scales
• Customers expect digital-first experiences and faster decisions

Products are shifting with longevity

Aging populations and longer life expectancies are changing what carriers sell. As Don Desiderato of Mantissa Group put it, products are morphing into income guarantees and retirement solutions-an ongoing blend of product and digital over the last decade.

That shift raises the bar for data, illustrations, and service. Every new rider or guarantee creates downstream requirements for clean data capture, model inputs, and configurable workflows.

AI can shrink the data backlog-if you feed it cleanly

Actuarial and claims teams are leaning on tools built outside insurance-data integration, pre-processing, and quality checks-to unify structured and unstructured policy data. Amanda Turcotte of Amalgamated Life noted that AI can flag missing fields, normalize inputs, and correct errors in a fraction of the time a junior analyst would need.

The big win is cycle time. What used to take months can become days, as long as ingestion rules, lineage, and exception handling are set up front.

You can't overlay new on old systems

Policy admin platforms were built at different times over 40 years. Desiderato summed up the CIO challenge: untangling many old platforms before new capabilities can take hold.

Andrew Burge of Nationwide underscored the core issue: processes rooted in forms. If a process starts on paper, you can't build KYC at point of application. Modernization means retiring form-first workflows, not skinning them with a new UI.

Agents plus digital beats agents alone

Replacing legacy doesn't mean cutting out producers. Desiderato described a hybrid model: customers research digitally, then talk to an agent when it matters. Agents who embrace digital engagement see better conversations and cleaner submissions.

The right model equips agents with prefill, e-apps, and instant status-so time goes to advice, not chasing paperwork.

Customers expect speed, fewer touches

Katie Kahl of iPipeline was blunt: people want digital-first, less paper, and faster answers. Many don't want to speak with anyone until decision time.

That means straight-through processing for clean cases, short paths for exceptions, and clear status at every step.

Practical playbook: near-term moves that compound

In the next 90 days

• Map product features to a common data model; define a single glossary for underwriting, actuarial, and claims.
• Stand up an integration layer to ingest e-app, third-party data, and legacy documents. Add OCR/NLP for forms and correspondence.
• Shift intake to e-app with dynamic questions, e-sign, and embedded CIP/KYC and AML checks at point of sale.
• Launch a data quality pipeline: required fields, normalization, lineage, and exception queues with SLAs.
• Pilot AI for data pre-processing and error detection with human-in-the-loop review and model monitoring aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

In the next 12 months

• Wrap legacy PAS with APIs; use a strangler pattern to migrate products incrementally and retire duplicate platforms.
• Embed third-party data (credit-safe, MVR, Rx with consent) to raise straight-through rates; prefill to cut NIGO rates.
• Give agents a modern workspace: quote, e-app, status, co-browsing, and clean handoffs to underwriting.
• Measure what matters: STP rate, time to decision, NIGO %, issue turn time, placement ratio, persistency, and agent/customer CSAT.
• Tighten compliance: continuous screening and recordkeeping for CIP/KYC and AML in line with FATF life insurance guidance.

What this makes possible

• Faster product updates because data fields, rules, and journeys are configurable.
• Cleaner actuarial and claims data, improving pricing, reserve analysis, and fraud detection.
• Lower operating costs as paper, rekeying, and NIGO rework decline.
• A better agent experience without losing advice at the moments that matter.

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