Claims professionals are entering a period of accelerated transformation. With client expectations rising, demographic pressures tightening, and technology evolving at record speed, the next 12 to 18 months could redefine how the insurance industry approaches claims handling – especially for adjusters on the ground.
Crawford & Company, recently recognized by Insurance Business Canada for its claims expertise, is navigating these changes with a focus on long-term adaptability and innovation.
Its strategy offers insight into how the broader industry may respond to current pressures and future demands.
Greg Smith (pictured), president of Crawford & Company (Canada), says that the road ahead is about finding the intersection between human expertise and digital innovation.
“The biggest opportunities are in finding the right balance – and the right moments – where people and technology can truly complement one another,” Smith said. “And over the next 12 to 18 months, we see tremendous potential to scale that approach across more areas of our business.”
The company, Smith said, has already rolled out AI-powered tools and streamlined workflow platforms, but its view of tech is not about automation for automation’s sake.
The industry context, he added, makes that approach more urgent.
“Each year brings new challenges,” Smith said. “The pace of change in our industry continues to accelerate, and with that comes rising client expectations and a more complex business environment.”
That growing complexity, he adds, is being felt across multiple fronts: from increasingly volatile climate risk, to pressure on litigation outcomes, to the macro-level shifts in how insurance companies manage vendor relationships.
“We’re seeing a meaningful shift in how our largest clients engage with us – they’re looking for true partnership relationships rather than purely transactional ones,” Smith said. “More and more, they’re involving us in conversations about their long-term strategies.”
For claims adjusters, this shift means the job may soon look less like a reactive service and more like an embedded strategic function.
Insurers themselves are also rethinking how many partners they need, he says, describing the current situation as showing “early sings of market consolidation.”
That reality raises the bar for vendors – and by extension, for their adjusting teams, Smith said. The firms that survive market consolidation will likely be those who can scale talent, tech, and trust at the same time.
Just as the expectations are growing, so too are the challenges in maintaining a skilled workforce, Smith warned. Adjusters across the industry are aging out, and new talent is increasingly hard to recruit.
“Attracting and retaining talent is more important than ever,” Smith said, and “retention is just as critical.”
For adjusters, that may signal an evolution: less churn, more meaningful development, and a renewed focus on roles that deliver long-term career value. But for employers, it’s a balancing act – one that requires culture, compensation, and training to evolve just as quickly as the technology. And that tempo isn’t slowing down.
“The pace of innovation, particularly in technology, is faster than we’ve ever seen,” Smith said. “Ideas are moving from concept to implementation at remarkable speed, and that opens up tremendous opportunities for us to enhance service, improve efficiency, and deliver even greater value to our clients.”
One of the clearest illustrations of how people, technology, and resourcefulness intersect came during last year’s unusually intense CAT season. Over the span of just 30 days, Canada experienced four major weather events across four provinces, putting enormous pressure on loss adjusting capacity nationwide.
Smith said regional licensing restrictions further complicated response efforts, limiting how easily resources could be shifted between provinces. That led Crawford to pilot new workflows that blended on-the-ground presence with remote support.
“In Alberta, we were able to equip property appraisers with Hover so they could transmit measured drawings to a team of adjusters working remotely to assess damages and prepare repair estimates,” Smith said.
“In Quebec, we were constrained by licensing and language barriers, so we teamed up experienced property adjusters from out-of-province with local trainees that could speak French to complete on-site inspections and estimates, which were then handed off to licensed adjusters for coverage determination and settlement.”
In short, “planning for volatility” needs to be “at the core” of what you do, Smith said. “Yes, there will be challenges [in 2026], but there’s also a lot to look forward to."
