A familiar insurance IT company recently issued a news release. It amused me because it presents an incredible volume of meaningless techno-babble, but says nothing about the problems addressed by its “solutions”.

The company said it had “launched its AI-powered, open, integrated, cloud-native platform [which] leverages digital engagement, data intelligence, core business processing solutions, and ML and GenAI capabilities to help insurers seamlessly innovate their offerings and processes, enabling them to stay competitive in a dynamic market with smart, data-driven business decisions and hyper automation of business process.”

Fine. But what does it do?

Every day, insurance underwriters, brokers, and exposure teams deal with familiar process pain-points. Such functional hurdles make it much harder for people to do their jobs. I experienced them as an underwriter and as a CUO. When I went looking for solutions, I was served a lot of babble, but no one had a tech product that would genuinely ease my underwriting team’s workloads, while helping them make complex decisions more easily.

We throw around the word ‘solution’ far too easily in insurance technology. We forget that a real solution is the resolution of a problem, not a new bit of tech.

Problems must lead the development of solutions. A great hot salad of integrated, open, cloud-native AI, liberally soaked with data, ML and GenAI, might sound tasty, but unless you’re actually hungry, it’s only empty calories.