The Insurance Adjuster Bottleneck

A recent look at the insurance industry shows a massive divide. While tech firms pitch automation as a panacea for manual work, the people actually doing the adjusting hate the current tools.

The numbers are stark. Staggering, even. In a survey of professional claims adjusters, 98 percent of reviews that mentioned AI were negative.

Why? It is not a luddite reflex. It is a design failure.

The adjusters aren’t fighting the idea of help. They are fighting tools that make their actual job harder. When an AI agent takes over a process without understanding the nuance of a claim, it creates a mess that a human has to clean up. It adds steps. It breaks context. It slows things down.

The adjusters are right to be skeptical. They know the reality of the work better than the people building the dashboards.

The AI worth caring about takes the part, not the whole. It amplifies the expert rather than trying to replace them. When an agentic system is designed correctly, it respects the human as the pilot. It automates the tedious, repetitive data entry so the human can focus on the actual decision-making.

When you build for the expert, you ask, "What part of this process is boring?" You don't ask, "How do we remove the person from the loop?"

The industry is full of hype about "replacing" roles. That is not where the value is. The value is in giving the person at the desk better leverage—letting them handle more claims with more accuracy because the machine handled the drudgery.

Until we shift our focus from "replacing" to "amplifying," these tools will keep running into walls. If your software makes the person using it feel redundant or frustrated, it isn't an upgrade. It is an obstacle.

Source: You Know Who Really Hates AI? Insurance Claims Adjusters