If there’s one thing I truly miss from my childhood, it’s spring break. There was nothing quite as exhilarating as getting an arbitrary week off for no apparent reason. Well there probably WAS a reason, and that reason was probably one of two things:

• Our teachers were contractually obligated to get one week off a semester to recover from our lunacy.
• Everyone got together and mutually decided that they wanted a week off as a reward for making it through punishing northeast winters.

Regardless of the reason, spring break was pretty sweet. Emphasis on “was.” These days, spring break isn’t even really a thing.

As an adult that doesn’t work in education and that doesn’t have kids of my own, spring break is a week just like any other week. In fact, if anything, it’s worse than any other week, because I’m all “business as usual” while there’s a large contingent of people out there enjoying the heck out of themselves.

If I’m miserable…everyone else should be, too! Why can’t I be destroying parts of Florida instead of a bunch of college kids with no real responsibilities or stress?

Okay, that maybe sounded somewhat selfish. Because it was. But I don’t care.

Let’s try not to think about the people who are enjoying this week more than we are by looking at the top insurance technology news.

The insurance industry is a prime target for AI technologies and solutions
Gordon Barnett, a Principal Analyst at Forrester, believes that the insurance industry is facing a significant opportunity to digitize and improve its business. And one of the new technologies that he thinks will go a long way towards making insurance companies more efficient, effective and profitable is artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Gordon, AI is still far from being pervasive across much of the insurance industry, despite a new focus on innovation and insurtech initiatives. However, he claims that insurance companies have already started experimenting with AI in four focus areas that include:

• Technologies Oriented and Experience Focused – including virtual assistants, speech analytics, recommendation engines and other technologies that improve customer experience.
• Technologies Oriented and Operational Focused – including text analytics, advanced analytics, facial and image recognition, machine learning, natural language generation and other technologies that improve operational efficiency.
• Solutions Oriented and Experience Focused – including conversational solutions and industry pre-trained solutions that help improve customer satisfaction and experience.
• Solutions Oriented and Operational Focused – including deep learning solutions such as risk management that can help improve operational efficiency.

As the maturation and adoption of these technologies continues, Gordon feels they will open the door for insurance providers to become more digital and focus more on their customers’ needs.

NFP introduces venture fund for investment in insurtech
You can tell what is important to a person or company based on how they spend their time and money. And if insurance broker, NFP, is any indication, the insurance industry is spending its money on insurtech solutions and innovation.

NFP announced that it’s launching a venture capital fund and innovation lab to help foster new insurtech and HR technologies that can improve customer experience. As Mike Goldman, NFP’s president and chief operating officer, told Insurance Business America:
“There are new technologies coming to play in the market that allow for a more seamless transfer of information between our customers, us and the insurance carriers. As we have gotten more involved in helping evaluate and advise around these technologies to deliver value to our clients, we are so involved in our evaluation that it also makes sense for us to look at some of them as potential areas for us to invest in.”

According to the article, the innovation lab is already filling up the pipeline with investment opportunities for the company, and exciting insurtech solutions for the industry.

Insurance firm banks on change management in digital overhaul
Sometimes, there’s more to a new technology implementation than simply evaluating solutions and purchasing some software licenses. Sometimes, companies face additional challenges – not with technology, but with their own culture.

That was one of the challenges that Axis Capital faced when looking to implement a new data analytics platform designed to help them drive additional revenue.

In this article in CIO, they speak with Darryl Catts, the CIO of Axis, about how a change management program designed to get corporate buy-in and overcome organizational inertia was necessary to make their digitization efforts effective.