“Technology is rarely the biggest roadblock - culture is,” said Mark Bennett (pictured), chief growth officer at ACORD Solutions Group. While technical debt and aging systems still complicate digital transformation in insurance, he believes it's internal resistance that continues to be the real drag on progress.
Insurers have operated on the same proprietary systems for decades - some 20 or 30 years old. For firms on dated platforms, modernizing often exposes deep integration gaps. “There’s an interoperability problem… some people can easily integrate, some people can’t,” Bennett said. Systems like Guidewire and Duck Creek offer flexibility, but many carriers remain locked into older architectures.
Yet the core issue, Bennett argued, is not the software - it’s the mindset. “The biggest factor among all is cultural change,” he said. Take ACORD forms, a staple in the property and casualty market. Agents and brokers are used to manually re-keying data into multiple systems. Introducing automation that bypasses this process doesn’t just mean new software - it means upending workflows that staff have relied on for years. “That’s a change of workflow and a change of the way of working inside that business, and that… is a real challenge,” he said.
As the industry shifts toward more modular, tailored risk products, artificial intelligence has become a key enabler. “AI has been one of the biggest transformational changes for firms,” Bennett said. But it’s not a silver bullet.
Previously, modernization required a complete overhaul of core systems. Now, insurers can extend the lifespan of those systems by layering AI and external data intelligence on top. “You can actually stay on your core systems, but augment it with better data intelligence,” he said. This includes tapping into third-party datasets and using generative tools to recommend next steps.
But that flexibility has also led to strategic misfires. Bennett cited specialty carriers that rushed into AI deployments without first redesigning their workflows. “They went hell-bent into ‘we need an AI strategy’… they implement AI in but without really defining what the new world workflow looks like,” he said. “That’s a cultural impact.”
He warned that inserting AI into a broken process doesn’t fix it - it just pushes the problem downstream. “You have to make sure that you’re driving proper end-to-end efficiency,” he said.
Bennett pushed firms to study where AI had failed as closely as they analyze success stories. “A lot of people want to talk about successes, but I constantly emphasize, no - talk about where it didn’t work and why didn’t it work,” he said.
Large carriers and brokerages tend to dominate conversations about modernization, but Bennett believes smaller agencies are quietly outpacing them. “They generally haven’t self-built a system,” he said. “They’ve probably licensed something off the shelf,” like Applied Systems or Vertafore.
These vendors are under pressure from investors to innovate and their tech updates reach thousands of users at once. That trickle-down effect benefits even the smallest shops, who get new AI functionality as part of their existing platforms.
More importantly, Bennett said smaller firms are often less burdened by bureaucracy. “We’ve seen historically… small to medium-sized [firms] have been the ones that actually made the biggest jump forward,” he said. “They’re just slightly more agile in their ability to go, ‘Let’s run, let’s give this a go.’”
He pointed to players like Howden in the specialty reinsurance space, which “accelerated into digital way faster than some of their peers” because they could pivot quickly.
Despite the urgency around innovation, Bennett stressed the need for stability, especially in regulated markets. Compliance, operational continuity, and mission-critical services can’t afford to break mid-transition. “It’s not just about deploying AI - it’s about making sure it doesn’t create new inefficiencies elsewhere,” he said.
