Digital Transformation in Insurance Is Accelerating. Can the Workforce Keep Up?
Digital transformation in insurance is moving faster than traditional workforce models. Leaders need to ask whether their people, skills and operating models can evolve quickly enough to turn technology into meaningful business outcomes.
How the insurance industry can keep pace with transformation was at the heart of WPR’s first Insurance Futures Forum. Chaired by Pete King and featuring Federico Spagnoli, Founder & CEO of Gangkhar, and Kathryn Edwards, Group Financial Controller at Pinion, the discussion explores how technology and changing operating models are reshaping insurance recruitment.
How Should the Insurance Market Plan Talent Strategy for Technology and Transformation?
One of the clearest messages was around managing digital transformation in insurance and that workforce planning needs to move beyond fixed job descriptions.
Kathryn explained that her conversations about recruitment are increasingly centred on capabilities rather than headcount. Traditional qualifications and technical foundations still matter, but as it’s harder to predict what a role will require three years from now, learning agility is a more critical attribute.
“My priority is looking for someone who’s demonstrated that they can learn on the job,” she said. That means looking for evidence someone can learn quickly and adapt, whether by changing roles, taking on new responsibilities or delivering transformation.
Federico described a similar approach. Rather than organising around fixed roles, responsibilities and reporting lines, Gangkhar looks first at the capabilities it needs to build.
AI may change how work gets done, but both Kathryn and Federico argue that this makes human judgement more important, not less.
Critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity are not new skills. What’s changing is their relative importance as technology takes on more repeatable execution. “What’s valuable is understanding the process that you’re running, not how you’re running it,” Kathryn explained.
Federico made a similar distinction when discussing AI in insurance. Organisations need to think beyond teaching employees how to use new tools. “We shouldn’t confuse training and development with change management,” he said. “Change management is much more comprehensive.”
Successful digital transformation in insurance requires decisions around which tasks technology should perform and where human expertise creates greater value. That will free teams from lower-value task so they can spend more time applying their judgement to decision-making.
Which Capabilities Should the Insurance Market Build Internally, and Which Should it Access Externally?
Transformation doesn’t mean replacing experienced insurance professionals with technologists. Insurance remains complex, regulated and relationship-driven. Technology alone cannot replace an understanding of how the market actually works.
Given a choice between a subject-matter expert with years of industry experience and a more junior candidate familiar with AI, Gangkhar will typically favour the experienced professional who is willing to learn new skills.
At the same time, as AI becomes more embedded in insurance operations, businesses need people who can bridge the gap between technology and insurance expertise. They will translate business judgement and regulatory requirements into how AI systems operate in practice, while understanding the realities of underwriting and claims.
Organisations pursuing digital transformation in insurance, need to decide which capabilities are critical to long-term competitive advantage. Those capabilities should be developed internally, while specialist external expertise provides skills that are only needed at specific stages of transformation.
How Can the Insurance Market Build a More Flexible Talent Model as Transformation Priorities Change?
Flexibility emerged as one of the strongest themes from the discussion.
Objectives can change rapidly because the technology and business opportunities are changing rapidly too. That requires a fundamentally different relationship with change, with roles organised around projects and capabilities rather than rigid responsibilities.
When asked what she would change about the insurance workforce today, Kathryn would “change the idea that change is a one-off. Change will be with us going forward consistently and we need to embrace that.”
Transformation creates periods where organisations need specialist capability quickly, but that can change as programmes move from strategy to implementation and eventually into business-as-usual. Talent models need to be as adaptable as the roadmap.
What Skills Will Become More Important as Technology Changes How the Insurance Market Operates?
Digital transformation in insurance makes deeply human capabilities more valuable. Qualities like judgement, creativity, communication, commercial instinct and learning agility.
Insurance has historically created strong structures for developing technical expertise, while development of human capabilities is less formalised. That may need to change. “All of those skills can be learned,” argues Katheryn. But doing so requires leaders who can demonstrate those behaviours and organisations prepared to recognise and reward them.
Rather than assuming AI in insurance will eliminate entry-level opportunity, technology could make early careers more compelling by removing repetitive work traditionally given to junior employees. But that creates another challenge. Those tasks have historically been part of how people learned. The industry needs to redesign early-career development around mentoring, scenarios, simulations, supervised decision-making and exposure to experienced professionals.
Young people who don’t set out to build careers in insurance become engaged when they are exposed to meaningful problems and opportunities to contribute.
How Should Leaders Anticipate Future Capability Gaps Before They Affect Transformation Delivery?
Waiting until a transformation programme needs a particular skill is already too late.
Leaders need visibility of the capabilities their strategy will require. That means mapping future transformation priorities against existing capability, identifying where people can be reskilled and deciding where external expertise will be needed. It also means creating genuine capacity for people to learn.
Kathryn shared a practical example from her time at Lloyd’s. Faced with the challenge of finding time for transformation alongside day-to-day responsibilities, her team started with a deceptively simple question: what can we stop doing?
Rather than layering transformation onto already-full workloads, they deliberately stopped certain activities and assessed the consequences. In some cases, by the time the next cycle arrived, a new process had been created that delivered the outcome better and faster.
The implication for digital transformation in insurance is significant. Organisations cannot expect people to learn, experiment and transform while treating existing activity as untouchable.
Transformation requires investment in technology, but it also requires leaders to create the capacity for people to change how work gets done.
Is Your Transformation Roadmap Creating New Capability Gaps?
WPR specialises in connecting insurance organisations with permanent and interim talent across Technology & Transformation, Finance, Audit, Risk and Compliance and other specialist insurance functions. Contact WPR to discuss the talent your business needs next.