The Future of Insurance: Industry Leaders

In this episode of Future of Retirement, host Jessica Hurley talks with Mike Domingos, Senior Vice President of Institutional Retirement at Pacific Life, about how Pacific Life is navigating and shaping the fast-growing pension risk transfer (PRT) market. Mike discusses how interest rates, market performance, and litigation risk are influencing today’s deal volumes and growth outlook, and how Pacific Life differentiates with over 80 years of PRT experience, strong brand and mutual structure, and the ability to manage increasingly complex plans, including innovative buy-in structures that convert to buyouts. They also explore how Pacific Life is leveraging AI and data science across pricing, onboarding, servicing, and call center operations—streamlining processes, handling large, complex data sets, and elevating the annuitant experience.

AI for insurance isn’t just another buzzword; it’s the transformative technology of our lifetimes.
In this riveting episode, we’re asking a different question. Not “How will we use AI?” but “How won’t we use AI?” Because if you’re only thinking about AI for one or two business functions, you’re already missing the point.
This is where the idea of the Frontier Firm comes in. Coined by Microsoft, a Frontier Firm is powered by intelligence on tap, run by human–agent teams, and defined by a new role for every employee: the “agent boss.” These organizations don’t just experiment with AI—they realign strategy, operating models, and talent around it, backed by trustworthy data foundations and strong leadership sponsorship.
In this conversation, you’ll hear from industry leaders who are already charting that course. We’ll explore what it really means to be a Frontier Insurer in the age of AI, how peers and technology partners are reshaping their businesses end to end, and the strategic moves executives can make now to protect relevance and unlock new growth.

In this riveting podcast, Matt Crum, President of Frank Winston Crum, shares how the company evolved from a Florida workers’ comp carrier into a multi-state specialty insurer while modernizing its technology foundation with Majesco. He explains how legacy systems constrained product expansion and speed to market, prompting a rigorous selection and blueprinting process to choose a scalable, configurable core platform. He also details how they now leverage AI across underwriting, servicing, and claims to reduce friction for agents and insureds, lower expenses, and improve decision-making.

In this illuminating episode, Denise Garth is joined by Arvind Sontha, Founder and CEO at Kyber, to look at how AI transforms claims communication by turning unstructured claim notes into clear, empathetic, and compliant customer correspondence while preserving governance and auditability across workflows. They highlight how AI templates encode the best adjusters’ storytelling skills, close talent gaps, remove bottlenecks with coverage attorneys, and ultimately free humans from robotic tasks so they can deliver more human, empathetic service at scale.

Insurers are entering a new era marked by rising costs, volatile risks, and mounting pressure on expense ratios that expose the limits of traditional business and technology models. As intelligent core platforms, cloud, advanced data & analytics, and new AI-native capabilities like GenAI and Agentic AI gain momentum, the gap between Leaders, Followers, and Laggards is hardening into a structural divide that will determine who pulls ahead over the next three to five years.
 
In this podcast with Denise Garth, Chief Strategy Officer at Majesco, and Gail McGiffin, Founder and CEO of GEM Insurance Advisors, you’ll explore how forward-thinking insurers are redefining their operating models and technology foundations to bend the cost curve, unlock new value from AI, and build a sustainable competitive edge. The conversation will unpack where investment and execution are stalling, how Leaders are prioritizing strategic initiatives, products, and channels, and why now is the time to move from AI experiments to real-world execution across underwriting, servicing, claims, and customer/agent experiences—so you can stay competitive, relevant, and positioned for growth in the Intelligent Era of Insurance.