Claude was down for about an hour yesterday. I don’t mean my great aunt’s fiancé (although Uncle Claude did occasionally pop in for a natter). I mean Anthropic’s AI agent Claude. I was frustrated when it stopped working. It just kept “thinking”, it told me, but I knew it was doing nothing.

For a moment I thought that I would have to stop work, then I remembered: I spent almost my entire working career without AI, like everybody else over 23. A lot of things have changed since artificial intelligence became so prominent, but the genuine variety inside our heads should still be enough to get on with the job, I told myself.

I picked up some work we’d started earlier in the week. We’ve been developing what the marketeers call ‘personas’. They’re characters who reflect the different types of individuals who used our products. The idea (invented no doubt by some Edward de Bono marketing guru type) is that by understanding the way various kinds of people think and work, we will build products which better suit them, and therefore will be both better liked and more efficient for users. Fame and fortune will follow.

It’s not a new idea. I got started in the insurance software development business when, as an MGA CUO, I couldn’t find an off-the-shelf platform that suited the needs and desires of my team and me. Creating a better user experience has therefore been my driving force since day one as a software vendor. Persona development is just another way of getting it right.

AI has maybe made it easier to deliver an ideal user experience. It has certainly allowed us do things which clients need and desire that we couldn’t do before. But as I reflected on personas, and the way the world has changed since the advent of AI, a fundamental truth crystallised.

Clients have not changed.

AI has changed a lot, but it hasn’t yet changed what people want from their workplace tools. The features the IT systems are able to deliver have obviously changed, and for the better, but the benefits that individuals want from them are the same, although AI may have set the bar higher.

As we worked through the personas exercise, imagining the different users of our platforms, it was increasingly obvious that they all want the same fundamental things from tech. Whether man or woman, experienced or entry-level, young or old, underwriter, assistant, accountant, modeller, or any of the other defining characteristics we could nail down that exemplify people in the underwriting business, they vary almost not at all in terms of what they want from their insurance technology.

They want a platform that’s as easy to use as the Netflix interface. It should be visual where possible, and fast. They want it to be intuitive, sometimes even doing the next step before they ask it to, but always at least taking them to the next step automatically. They want it to be reliable, of course meaning that it doesn’t lock up all the time, but more importantly, that it is reliable in terms of the integrity of the data they record.

They want total confidence that the data is correct and can be verified. That’s important, it seems, to all users. They want a single source of truth, and it has to be today’s truth, not one from the last upload. It has to be the same truth that’s stored everywhere else in the system.

They want to have easy access, to be just a click or two away from exactly the data that they need. But they don’t want all the other data that they don’t need. Finally, they want a system that works seamlessly with all the others, including the systems operated by their external business partners. Oh, and they don’t want to have to do any rekeying. Not ever.

Everything else about the build of an insurance technology platform is just a bunch of details.

How we get a platform to do all those things has been changed forever by AI. In some cases, what users expect a platform is able to do is very more than it was before AI, but again that’s just details. The benefits they seek are the same.

What users really want is a set of workplace tools that makes their job easier. That will never change.

Guillaume Bonnissent is CEO of Quotech.