A practical guide to the operating model, digital intelligence layer, and agentic workforce transformation redefining insurance in 2026 and beyond.

Written by Sabine VanderLinden

• The Intelligence Core is the foundational digital intelligence layer that transforms insurers into Frontier Firms, enabling intelligence on tap, human-agent teams, and graduated autonomy across underwriting, claims, and customer service. To effectively build an Intelligence Core, organizations must establish strong foundations in cloud infrastructure, data management, identity verification, and security, ensuring safety, security, and effective operation of AI systems and agentic tools.
• 82% of insurance leaders say 2026 is the pivotal year to rethink operations, yet most are still trapped in legacy behavioural debt, not just technical debt. The protection gap will not close with incremental thinking. Investment in digital transformation and AI readiness is essential. The AI Readiness approach ensures an organization's data estate and controls are secure-by-design with clear guardrails.
• Frontier Firms are achieving 70% faster quotes, 75% faster claims, and 23% productivity gains by embedding agentic AI directly into core workflows — not bolting it on as an afterthought. The Intelligence Core blueprint helps organizations embed "intelligence on tap" across their entire operating model, distinguishing leaders from landlords.

What If Your Biggest Competitor in 2027 Isn’t a Company?

Imagine this. It’s a Wednesday morning. Your Chief Underwriting Officer walks into the boardroom with a smile you haven’t seen since the last clean audit. Overnight, AI agents triaged 400 submissions, prepared risk notes with cited guidelines, and surfaced the 38 most winnable opportunities for the team, powered by Majesco's agentic AI and Copilot capabilities. No human touched a keyboard. The underwriters arrive, coffee in hand, and spend their day doing what they were actually hired to do: making smart, nuanced decisions on complex risks. Business leaders are increasingly recognizing the need to transform business operations through AI acts—deploying AI as a digital assistant, team member, or autonomous agent—to drive efficiency, agility, and innovation.

Majesco product release 2025

Now imagine the insurer down the road. Same market. Same talent pool. But their team is still drowning in spreadsheets, toggling between four disconnected systems, and manually triaging submissions one painful click at a time. They respond to 10% of the demand that hits their inbox. The rest? Lost to faster competitors. AI agents are already being deployed in customer service, marketing, and product development across leading organizations, illustrating how agentic AI is transforming industries.

This is the gap that’s already opening between Frontier Firms — the top 5–10% of insurers rebuilt around an Intelligence Core — and everyone else. The question for every executive reading this is painfully simple: which side of that gap are you on?

Why This Matters Now: The £1.8 Trillion Wake-Up Call

The global protection gap stands at $1.8 trillion — a figure so staggering it has become wallpaper in boardroom presentations. Millions remain uninsured or underinsured. And here’s the uncomfortable truth that Majesco’s Chief Product Officer Manish Shah put bluntly in our recent conversation: this is not primarily a consumer education problem. It’s a product and experience design failure.

“If our customers don’t understand or see the value in the product, then it is a design problem,” Shah told me. “We need to move from selling policies to orchestrating protection.”

That reframing matters enormously. The protection gap isn’t closing because the industry keeps designing rigid, inside-out products built around actuarial constructs and policy jargon rather than around real human lives and risk appetites. Digital-first customers want intuitive, embedded experiences. They want to simulate “what if” scenarios, not decipher 40-page exclusion schedules. To address this, organizations must develop a clear digital transformation strategy and foster a cultural shift that embraces new technologies and processes. This enables them to create new business processes and models that are more responsive to customer needs and market realities.

Listen to my discussion with Manish Shah on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast channel.

Meanwhile, the capacity crisis is real. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 82% of leaders say 2026 is the pivotal year to rethink strategy and operations. A staggering 80% of the workforce lacks the time or energy to meet current demands. And 53% of leaders are demanding productivity increases despite already-elevated burnout risks. The math doesn’t work without a fundamentally different operating model. That model is the Frontier Firm.

Read two of my articles diving into the Capacity Gap. Why Your Corporate Strategy is a Leaky Bucket, and The Real Crisis in Insurance Isn’t Capital. It’s Capacity!

To successfully build a frontier firm, organizations should focus on four transformation pillars:

1. enrich employee experience through workforce development and skills enhancement
2. reinvent customer engagement by leveraging digital tools
3. reshape core processes and business processes to embed AI and support innovation, and
4. democratize AI creation, enabling teams to build and scale digital solutions across the enterprise.

The Frontier Firm Operating Model: Three Dimensions That Change Everything

The term “Frontier Firm” originated in economics to describe the smartest and fastest organisations in any industry: the top performers who constantly experiment, adapt, and scale what works. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index popularised the concept, defining it as a company powered by three interlocking capabilities.

First: Intelligence on Tap.

This is the digital intelligence layer, AI capabilities available on demand, abundant and affordable across the entire enterprise. Not a siloed AI experiment in a lab. Not a chatbot sitting awkwardly on a webpage. Intelligence woven into every workflow, every decision point, every customer interaction. In insurance terms, this means an Intelligence Core where your policy administration, billing, claims, and underwriting systems all have embedded AI that understands context, anticipates needs, and surfaces insights in real time, mirroring the way AI is transforming insurance underwriting. Embedding AI agents into core processes securely and at scale is essential for operational transformation and for creating new business models.

Second: Human-Agent Teams.

Hybrid teams where AI agents, your digital colleagues, work alongside humans to execute complex tasks. The AI handles the volume, the research, and the pattern recognition. The human brings judgment, empathy, and strategic thinking. This close collaboration between humans and digital colleagues enables organisations to streamline workflows and drive innovation. As Shah described from Majesco’s client work, agents now process submissions overnight, prepare quotes with cited underwriting notes, and surface the best opportunities. The underwriter’s role shifts from data wrangler to decision architect.

Third: The Agent Boss Role.

Every employee becomes a manager of AI agents, orchestrating rather than doing. This is workforce transformation at its most profound, not replacing people, but fundamentally redefining what their time is spent on. The digital labour handles the operational mechanics. The human focuses on the strategic, the ambiguous, and the deeply human. New roles are emerging, such as AI Trainer and AI Data Specialist, as agent management becomes a key responsibility for employees. The 'Agent Boss' role involves upskilling employees to manage and supervise digital workers, enhancing oversight capabilities.

To support this shift, organisations should establish a centralized Intelligence Resources function, a team spanning IT, HR, and Operations, to manage digital labor and oversee the integration of AI agents. The journey to becoming a Frontier Firm typically unfolds in three phases: initial assistance (where AI supports basic tasks), human-agent teams (where close collaboration between people and digital colleagues drives outcomes), and autonomous agent operation (where AI agents independently execute core processes under human supervision).

The Intelligence Core: Why the Foundation Matters More Than the Features

Here’s where most digital transformation programmes go sideways. Executives buy the AI hype, launch a few proof-of-concept projects, and then wonder why nothing scales. Hugh MacArthur, Vice Chairman of Bain Capital, recently delivered a line that should be pinned to every CTO’s wall: if you’re still doing PoCs with AI, you’re already late.

Establishing strong foundations is essential for effectively implementing AI and achieving high-quality outcomes. Without these, even the most advanced technologies will fail to deliver lasting impact.

Shah echoed this with characteristic directness:

"Don’t try to find more excuses to delay. The question isn’t ‘how do I fit AI in later?’ It’s ‘how can AI help my transformation right now?"

The critical insight is that an Insurance Intelligence Layer cannot be bolted onto legacy systems and legacy thinking. A system implemented with a legacy mindset on the latest tech stack is still a legacy system. That’s not a technology problem, it’s what Shah calls behavioural debt, and it’s far more expensive than technical debt.

Majesco’s approach with its Intelligent Core Suite illustrates what an AI-native foundation looks like in practice. As a Microsoft Azure OpenAI partner, they’ve built the industry’s first GenAI assistant — Majesco Copilot — embedded directly across policy, billing, and claims workflows. This isn’t AI as an add-on. It’s AI as architecture. The intelligence is baked into the platform, not sprinkled on top afterward.

Strong governance must be established early to ensure data privacy, role-based access, and a visible stop button for task routing. The Intelligence Core replaces fragmented AI tools with a structured, automated engine, which is essential for quality and effective transformation.

Graduated Autonomy: The Trust-Building Roadmap for Digital Risk Intelligence

One of the most practical frameworks to emerge from our conversation is Majesco’s concept of graduated autonomy: a three-stage approach that addresses the single biggest barrier to agentic AI adoption: fear.

Stage 1: Decision Support.

AI synthesises information, provides recommendations, and surfaces relevant data. Here, AI acts as a digital assistant, delivering actionable insights and helping employees build familiarity with AI. The human makes every decision. Think of an underwriter receiving a fully prepared risk brief with cited guidelines and market comparables before they even open the file. Majesco’s benchmarks show this stage alone delivers 70% faster quotes and 23% productivity gains (see chart above).

Stage 2: Supervised Execution.

Human-agent teams assign AI agents to specific, repetitive tasks within defined guardrails, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency, with human oversight. Claims triage is a perfect example: where the process used to take three to five days of elapsed time, AI agents now complete it overnight: assessing severity, flagging special investigation needs, evaluating litigation risk, and assigning the right adjuster. Claims processing has accelerated by 75%.

Stage 3: Selective Autonomy.

For well-understood, low-risk scenarios, AI operates independently, taking over more routine tasks and freeing humans to focus on higher-value work that requires judgment and creativity. But Shah drew a clear line: certain decisions should never be fully autonomous. Claims denial, for instance, impacts someone’s life and requires human empathy, not just algorithmic assessment.

Human consultants bring strategic thinking, empathy, and expertise, while AI agents deliver tireless execution and precision—together, they create a powerful combination for frontier firms.

“We don’t see AI as a replacement for human beings,” Shah emphasised. “AI is an enabler for humans to elevate their skills to impact at a higher level.”

Building Trust: Because AI That Works ‘On’ Customers Will Always Fail

Perhaps the most quotable insight from our conversation was Shah’s trust litmus test:

“Trust will be built with AI if the customer feels AI is working for them, not on them.”

This reflects the emerging view that combining AI with empathy is the new competitive edge in insurance claims.

Responsible implementation of AI requires effective change management to overcome resistance and ensure successful transformation. Digital transformation initiatives often face barriers, including change management challenges and employee resistance, making it essential for leaders to be accountable for guiding these transitions.

He outlined three pillars for operationalising trust in an AI-enabled insurance model.

• Transparency means explaining decisions in plain language. If you use social media data to inform pricing, say so and help customers understand how their behaviour influences their costs. Effective communication within the organization is essential for addressing challenges during digital transformation and building trust among both employees and customers.
• Consistency means the customer experience doesn’t change depending on which channel they use or which agent picks up the phone. 
• Recourse means always providing a clear, easy path to escalate any AI-driven decision to a human being.

This is where the Agentic Frontier gets genuinely exciting. Imagine a claims process where AI accelerates the payment, reduces friction, and eliminates errors, but if the customer disagrees with a decision, they see a simple message: “Click here to speak to a human.” That combination of speed and humanity is what builds loyalty. As Shah noted, if someone offers him a faster, more painless claims experience and charges slightly higher premiums, he’s switching to them.

Majesco's sample customer base

The Three-to-Five Year Vision: What Success Feels Like

Shah painted a compelling picture of what the insurance experience should feel like when successful frontier firms get this right. These organizations adapt to changing market conditions and strengthen their supply chains through digital transformation, enhancing resilience, transparency, and responsiveness, aligning with the long-range outlook described in AI Horizons 2030 for an autonomous insurance world. Insurance becomes a proactive safety net, not a reactive payment mechanism: helping prevent losses, not just indemnifying them after the fact. Onboarding becomes nearly invisible, with instant risk assessment and tailored coverage replacing mountains of paperwork. The relationship shifts from episodic (annual renewal conversations) to continuous, with AI-driven coaching that automatically optimises coverage based on life events.

And here’s the emotional benchmark that matters most, Shah said:

“The true measure of success is that the emotional tone shifts from anxiety to confidence. Insurance becomes an active partner. The customer knows the insurer is interested in their safety, their health, their financial resilience.”

The future belongs to organizations that embrace incremental approaches to digital transformation, such as discovery-driven planning, to mitigate risks and achieve long-term success, as highlighted at the Global Insurtech Summit on the digital future of insurance. Understanding market conditions is crucial for managing risks and ensuring successful transformation outcomes.

Your Frontier Firm Playbook: Five Moves to Make This Quarter

For the transformation executives reading this at 5.30am before the family wakes up (we see you), here’s the practical playbook distilled from leaders who are already executing.

One: Audit your behavioural debt, not just your tech debt.

Map every process where the answer to “why do we do it this way?” is “because we always have.” Those are your highest-value transformation targets. As Shah argued, incrementalism born from fear is the enemy of relevance.

Two: Demand embedded intelligence, not bolt-on AI.

Your Intelligence Core should have AI woven into the platform from the ground up. If your vendor’s AI strategy requires a separate integration project, you’re looking at modern legacy in disguise. Majesco’s approach — Copilot embedded across all workflows with 84% daily usage — shows what “intelligence on tap” actually means in practice. A company's AI strategy must prioritize the extensive integration of AI agents, as 81% of leaders expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company’s AI strategy within the next 12–18 months.

Three: Start with operational efficiency, scale to effectiveness.

Begin where the ROI is clearest — claims triage, submission prioritisation, loss control reporting — then expand to the bigger prize: customer trust, relationship depth, and growth. Organizations are increasingly adopting AI to gain a competitive advantage and enhance productivity, with efficiency wins buying you credibility and runway for the transformation that actually matters.

Four: Adopt graduated autonomy as your governance framework.

Decision support first, supervised execution second, selective autonomy third. Frontier Firms utilize a centralized control plane to manage and govern AI agents, ensuring safe operation and scalability. This approach also relies on human direction, where employees act as agent bosses, orchestrating and overseeing AI agents to align with organizational goals. This satisfies regulators (from the NAIC’s AI principles to the EU AI Act), builds internal confidence, and ensures you never lose the human empathy that makes insurance meaningful.

Five: Measure trust, not just throughput.

Track whether your customers feel AI is working for them. Monitor escalation rates, resolution satisfaction, and the emotional tone of interactions. The real KPI of a Frontier Firm isn’t cycle time — it’s confidence. Ongoing development of workforce skills is essential, and leaders must treat AI as a core capability woven into company culture, rather than a static tool, to ensure long-term success.

The Leadership Courage Question

Shah left our conversation with a challenge that deserves to sit with every insurance executive:

“The tools are here. The need is clear. The only real question is: Is there leadership courage?”

In today’s landscape, organizations face significant challenges in digital transformation, ranging from resistance to change management and legacy system integration to resource constraints and cultural barriers. Overcoming these obstacles requires innovation and the adoption of new models, especially as societal shifts, technological progress, and crises like COVID-19 reshape expectations.

He’s right. The technology exists. Majesco’s Intelligent Core is already delivering 96% time improvements in loss control reporting, 75% faster claims processing, and 70% faster quoting. Carriers across P&C, Life, and Group Benefits are deploying prevention services, integrating IoT and telematics, and embedding risk coaching into the customer experience. The Intelligence Core blueprint helps firms embed 'intelligence on tap' across their entire operating model, distinguishing true leaders from landlords.

But the brave ones — and Shah defines bravery beautifully here — are willing to rethink the business model itself. Not just the tech stack. They ask: “How do we help our customers live safer and healthier?” rather than “How do we process the current business faster?” Frontier leaders prioritize high-value automation and governance, treating AI as a core capability woven into company culture, while landlords use AI superficially as a static tool.

This year, the gap between Frontier Firms and the rest will become visible to customers, shareholders, and regulators alike. The question isn’t whether insurance will change. It’s whether you’ll lead that change or watch it happen from the stands.

The Agentic Frontier is here. Your Intelligence Core is the entry ticket. And the clock is ticking.

Make sure to reach out if you have a question here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Intelligence Core in insurance?

An Intelligence Core is an AI-native platform that embeds artificial intelligence directly into core insurance operations — policy administration, billing, claims, and underwriting. Unlike bolt-on AI tools, an Intelligence Core provides contextual, real-time intelligence within the workflow where decisions are made, creating the digital intelligence layer that Frontier Firms require to operate at scale.

What is a Frontier Firm, and how does it apply to insurance?

A Frontier Firm is an organisation in the top 5–10% of its industry that dramatically outperforms competitors by building operations around AI. In insurance, this means deploying intelligence on tap, human-agent teams, and the Agent Boss model to achieve step-change improvements in speed, accuracy, customer experience, and profitability. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index identified this as the defining organisational model of 2025–2026.

How does graduated autonomy differ from full AI automation?

Graduated autonomy is a phased approach to AI adoption: decision support first, then supervised execution, then selective autonomy for well-understood, low-risk tasks. Unlike full automation, it maintains human oversight for high-stakes decisions (such as claims denials) and builds trust incrementally with employees, customers, and regulators.

What results are Frontier Firms achieving with an Intelligence Core?

Leading insurers using Majesco’s Intelligent Core report 70% faster quotes, 75% faster claims processing, 23% productivity capacity gains, 84% daily AI usage rates, 96% improvement in loss control reporting time, and 80% effort reduction in routine broker requests. Beyond efficiency, these organisations report improved customer satisfaction, stronger retention, and the ability to launch new products in weeks rather than months.

Is the protection gap a consumer education problem or a design problem?

According to Majesco’s CPO Manish Shah, the $1.8 trillion protection gap is primarily a product-and-experience design failure, not an education gap. Insurance products remain too complex, too rigid, and too disconnected from how modern consumers live. Closing the gap requires shifting from transactional policy sales to continuous, data-driven protection orchestration enabled by an Intelligence Core.

Sources and References

1. Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Was Born
2. Majesco Intelligent Core Suite — Product Overview
3. Majesco’s GenAI and Agentic AI: Financial and Operational Impact Across the Insurance Value Chain (2025)
4. Majesco Fall 2025 Release: AI Agents Transforming Intelligent Insurance Operations
5. Bain & Company: Most P&C Insurers Still ‘Dabbling’ in Gen AI (2025)
6. Telefónica Tech: What Is a Frontier Firm and Why Is It Important?
7. Majesco 2026 Future Trends Report: Vital to Compete and Accelerate Growth in a New Era of Insurance
8. EU AI Act — European Commission
9. NAIC Principles on Artificial Intelligence
10. Interview: Manish Shah, CPO, Majesco — The Intelligent Core: How AI Is Redefining Insurance (February 2026)