Artificial intelligence has become the loudest conversation in insurance innovation, but at CRC Group, the focus is less on hype and more on where technology genuinely improves outcomes. For David Hurst (pictured), chief technology and innovation officer, the question is not whether AI will transform insurance, but how to deploy it in ways that reduce friction, prove value and strengthen long-term competitiveness across a complex wholesale and underwriting platform.
CRC Group spans wholesale brokerage, delegated authority and binding, and MGA/MGU underwriting operations. That breadth, Hurst said, shapes how the firm thinks about innovation – and why discipline matters.
“We are not manufacturing widgets,” he said. “The entire value chain in insurance is around information.”
That reality places insurance “right in the crosshairs” for AI-led transformation, he added, creating both opportunity and risk. “If we don’t think about where the disruption is coming from, somebody else will.”
The starting point for CRC Group’s innovation agenda is not technology but client experience. In a recent two-year IT strategy, the company worked backward from business goals to technology decisions – an approach Hurst believes is increasingly critical.
One major theme is friction. While CRC operates in complex, non-admitted and specialty markets, expectations are being shaped by simpler digital insurance experiences.
“People are beginning to say, ‘If I can do a frictionless rate, quote and bind on simple risks, why can’t I do it on more complex risks?’” Hurst said.
That question applies to both distribution efficiency and value creation. In wholesale brokerage, submissions often arrive as messy collections of forms and PDFs. CRC’s role, Hurst said, is to make sense of that complexity on behalf of retail brokers.
“As long as we’re able to leverage AI to ingest and synthesize that information quickly, give us a summary and give our client a summary, that’s not only reducing friction – it’s a significant value add beyond what’s feasible today,” he said.
With no shortage of “shiny things” in the AI market, discipline is essential. “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything,” Hurst said. Client impact and return on investment determine which ideas move forward.
The vendor landscape, particularly in AI and data, is crowded and fast-moving. CRC’s approach reflects both caution and pragmatism.
“I take a fairly rigorous view of things that are at the top of the hype cycle,” Hurst said, noting parallels between today’s AI enthusiasm and the dot-com era. AI, he stressed, is not a passing trend – but it is subject to inflated expectations.
CRC’s first principle is experimentation at small scale. Rather than lengthy selection processes aimed at finding a single “perfect” vendor, the firm runs multiple proofs of concept simultaneously.
“We pick a half-dozen vendors for different parts of our business, often trying to solve the same problem, and give them the opportunity to prove whether their technology is truly differentiated,” Hurst said.
Avoiding lock-in is equally important. CRC keeps scopes, prices and commitments deliberately constrained to protect against market shifts or vendor failure. Internally, the company often builds parallel solutions to test whether vendors are meaningfully ahead or simply early adopters of common tools.
“Assuming I’ve got four data-ingestion use cases, I might have vendors doing three of them, and our internal lab will do the fourth,” Hurst said.
Benchmarking underpins all of it. CRC is investing in test beds with ground-truth data to validate vendor claims. “If three vendors are all self-reporting accuracy, those numbers aren’t worth much,” he said.
While AI promises new capabilities, Hurst is clear-eyed about the barriers to realizing them. Data sits at the top of the list.
CRC Group’s growth through acquisition has created both technical and data debt – fragmented systems, inconsistent master data and limited interoperability. “Data represents both the opportunity and the obstacle,” Hurst said.
The challenge becomes evident in basic strategic needs, such as giving carrier partners a consolidated view of their relationship with CRC. Without unified data, even simple insights are difficult to produce.
“Provided that we can get the master data management right, there are some wonderful tools that can help,” Hurst said. Solving that problem, he added, would unlock significant advantages on both the distribution and capacity sides.
Process is the second major constraint. Technology alone does not generate value, Hurst said – transformed processes do.
“If I’ve got 50 different divisions all doing things differently, there’s only so much value AI is going to give me,” he said. Business engagement and education are essential, particularly to counter the idea that AI is a silver bullet.
Encouragingly, Hurst sees AI beginning to help solve some of the complexity it introduces, including tools that can analyze operational data and recommend process improvements. “What used to be a slog may become a lot easier,” he said.
Making innovation closer to the business
Earlier this year, CRC Group reorganized its IT function to bring product management and innovation together under Hurst’s leadership. The aim is to ensure innovation originates from client and business needs, not from technology curiosity.
“The place to identify innovation is not from the technology out – it’s from the business and the client in,” he said.
