Maximizing Workers’ Compensation Profitability: Insights From Industry Leaders

Greetings, and welcome to our webinar, maximizing workers’ compensation profitability. I’m Rhianna Naslin, chief marketing officer at Origami, and we’re excited to have you join us today as we explore the critical role of technology in cloud transformation in the optimization of profitability and efficiency of workers’ compensation. I’m delighted to introduce our three incredible panelists who will share their insights and strategies based on their own experiences. As senior vice president of claims for PIE Insurance, we have Carla Woodard. She’s responsible for planning and directing all aspects of PIE’s claims functions and teams. This includes managing and implementing strategic internal claims and TPA programs. Carla brings nearly thirty years of claims management experience to the PIE team. We also have Brandon Driscoll, Insperion’s chief business officer. Brandon oversees the company’s finance, underwriting, and IT functions and provides strategic vision and direction to the company. Brandon has over fifteen years of experience in the insurance industry in various roles with finance and operations. He also serves on Inspiron Insurance’s board. I would also like to introduce Chris Bennett, chief strategy officer for Origami. Chris is responsible for guiding the core divisions growth and development. This includes forgoing industry, forging industry alliances, and building new capabilities and solution sets to address the dynamic and evolving needs of our diverse clientele, including property casualty insurers, MGAs, program administrators, TPAs, and risk pools. Thank you all for participating today. Should we go ahead and jump in? Let’s do it. Good to be here. Let’s do that. So as we know, maintaining profitability requires insurers to navigate various complexities specific to worker’s compensation. To get the discussion started, I’d like to discuss some of the critical capabilities the market relies on for achieving operational success. So, Brandon, I think we’ll kick it off with you, with the first question being, how are you addressing the challenges posed by rising claim severity and medical care inflation in workers’ compensation? Yeah. So we’re analyzing every corner of our work comp book right now. The trend that we see there is not limited to workers’ comp either. We’re seeing the same thing on our medical liability line. We’re looking at what’s causing the highest propensity of claims using our own data and benchmarking data, from our excess carrier, using information from them. We’re trying to determine how we can combat these trends. We’re also taking a deeper look from an underwriting perspective. We’re looking at a proprietary way, to look at our work larger work comp policies, and it’s, making sure that the pricing on those accounts is where it needs to be and is adequate. And we’re really trying to understand where the pricing needs to be just given the increases in claims severity and, the medical care inflation. So things going beyond just the typical rate times the exposure or just the claims experience. You know, we’re looking at factors that make for a great account. We’re working with our customers, different structures for their coverage, potentially taking on higher deductibles, things like that. We’re also being really vigilant with our claims expenses right now. So we’re working hard with our existing partners that we have today. We’re trying to find new partners who provide the value that we need to really manage our claims. And it’s been difficult because we’re in a super competitive market with constantly decreasing rates, and we’re we’re continuing to see pressures in the loss ratio really caused by the severity and and medical inflation. Sounds like a very robust view to manage through those challenges and stay competitive for sure. Carla, I’m curious from your your perspective, what you’re seeing as well, but more of a focus with the the claims perspective. Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s nice to see, Brandon, we’re we’re very aligned on the strategies that we’re looking at As far as pricing, I would say that loss ratio is definitely one of the top objectives for us. And so the pricing piece comes into it that you were talking about. But on the loss severity side, we’re really focusing on those cost containment strategies, looking vendor partnerships where we can get those cost savings, get faster recoveries for our injured employees, and really leaning into prioritizing education about early claim reporting. The sooner we can get our adjusters working on a claim, the better the outcomes, and that includes reduced cost. So really trying to get education out there to our policyholders, our agency partners, and helping them to get that claim reported as quickly as possible. We can then direct the injured workers to appropriate care. We can streamline communication, get them back to work more quickly. But beyond that, obviously, and we’re going to talk about that a bit more, but the technology adoption and claims management improvements in general are things that we look at using platforms like Origami. It supports us having data under one roof. It allows us to move more quickly and, you know, we can expand on this a little bit later. But looking at things like AI and our core platforms are things that provide efficiency to our adjusters and we can get to that claim resolution and cost containment more quickly, focusing on things like return to work, risk mitigation, and all of the important things that that really feed into those costs that we’re seeing. Carla, I really appreciate how, you’ve leveraged technology not only to drive the outcomes for the business, but also for the employees impacted by the worker event. That’s excellent. Chris, I also wanted to ask you just I know you have a lot of relationships stay on top of trends and have a point of view. What are you seeing in terms of challenges? Certainly, we see we see it across our client base. You know, the the trend is to leverage the technology to get better insights to help, you know, in the risk selection, to help in the adjudication of the claims, ultimately with the goal of of driving down the cost of claims. And in in essence, you know, the final result is is better performance in a loss ratio. So kind of playing on that theme, Chris, of speed delivering more efficiency and vis a vis impact. Carla, a question for you. How do you see automation playing a role in improving efficiency for pie and how it’s evolving? Yeah. So efficiency really drives a couple of different things. It drives scalability. It drives the claim outcomes that we’re talking about as far as cost containment and great experience for our policyholders and their injured employees. At its broadest level, automation really helps reduce the time that’s being spent on rote tasks that really aren’t a value add. And it provides bandwidth for our human adjusters to really spend their time leveraging their expertize, their knowledge. You know, the use cases for automation in terms of efficiency, they can be as simple as summarizing, you know, one hundred page document that comes in, whether it’s a medical report or a legal pleading, And that can help save time, certainly. But we’re really looking at things from a more broad perspective where we can absolutely automate end to end, maybe lower severity claims and think about straight through processing at a more broad level to increase efficiency. And then, of course, communication is something that is is really up and coming in terms of how we can also leverage it for the customer experience and getting information out to our customers at key points in time within the life of a claim as opposed to waiting for them to give us a call and ask questions. So it really drives efficiency in many different ways. I can imagine how the end to end would help with that efficiency and that that whole picture within that workflow. Chris, I’m sure you see that and hear that from other customers. Are there other trends that you’re seeing as well in automation? Yeah. I think, you know, automation. I think of automation. You know, we we heard it tossed around as business process automation for a while. Right? That’s a a technology that’s certainly more mature and more well adopted in the insurance industry. And I think we’re seeing, you know, in a lot of cases, in the underwriting process and the claims process, and Carlo touched on this, it’s it’s getting things to people faster. Right? So information, it’s it’s summarizing information as quickly as possible. It’s also reducing the number potentially of steps in a process and it’s getting, you know, we mentioned it in the first section, it’s getting the right information to the right person as fast as possible, right? And that’s really the goal of the automation. It’s how do I take information that’s coming in, information that I know on this account or on this particular claim, and help to drive communications, decision making, and routing of that file so that it can get handled as quickly as possible. It provides a better service experience for everyone. It is a very common theme. It is something that we see in every one of our implementations. The great thing about, you know, the technology that drives automation is it’s nonstop. Right? So clients are always thinking about, hey, what am I doing that seems like it could be easier? And it is a it is a constant growth with clients to to continually adapt and adjust and to automate, you know, new pieces of their workflow. That makes a lot of sense. And I think, Brandon, for you, I would just open it up to do you have anything to add to what Carla and Chris have shared and or kind of how you think about the the future of automation. Yeah. I think Chris hit the nail on the head too, and he talks about it’s constant. It’s it’s ever continuing, and and we like to to think that way as well. You know, we’re a multiline carrier, so, you know, automation is is critical for us and, you know, making us be more cross functional and really trying to extract as much value as we can where relationships really matter, you know, and and the people really matter in our company. So there’s a lot of investment dollars going on in there, and I’m sure you guys know. And I’d seen some numbers Gartner had put out that, like, thirty percent of of of insurance respondents are making material increases in their investments in automation, and no one’s really, you know, coming off on the accelerator on that on that front. So there’s a ton of activity going on right there right now. And you can see it in the technology that’s being employed today. I think it’s come, you know, tremendously far in the last even just the last three to five years how fast and how quick things are moving. And the amount of innovation that’s going on in our industry today. It’s it’s, it can be overwhelming, but it’s also, you know, invigorating, I think. So even though it’s kind of been going on and off over the last decade or so, you know, I think we’ve kind of reached that that crux of where we have, you know, old school insurers that were typically, you know, pushing off innovation and and automation are really embracing it. And I think that that’s exciting to see in our industry. You know? So I think you’ve got new MGA entrants, for example, that are really starting, you know, with the innovation first and and foremost first and foremost, like that tech mindset. And so I think that, you know, we’re we’re really all these things just kind of starting and being okay now that the technology is is available, and relatively low friction to start up. You know, what what can we do to really make an impact? And I think it’s, you know, all the little, startups that are coming up in in the industry and and, you know, origami embracing the ability to, you know, partner with with individuals and, bring those to to, you know, customers, you know, really makes it impactful impactful for us for for driving automation and innovation in our company. That’s excellent. It definitely is a real moment for innovation. And I think on on that topic, it’s a good segue to the topic of AI. I feel like you can’t turn a corner without hearing about the hot topic of AI. Chris, I think I’ll I’ll turn to you and ask the next question, which is what role do you see predictive analytics and AI playing in the future of workers’ compensation? And, how how do you see this technology being leveraged? So in work comp in particular, it’s really interesting. Predictive is is a little bit more mature than than the generative AI, right? So we’ve had good predictive models in workers compensation that can help, you know, predict for instance the the amount of time that an employee is potentially going to be out with a given type of injury, right? And the type of treatments that you need to be looking at. But those relied on structured data, relied on being able to feed that model and understand kind of where that data comes from. I think what’s great in our industry and what we’re really seeing is the power of generative AI, not only to help automate day to day tasks, but to start to take unstructured data, whether it’s a pile of documents or medical records or even photographs and potentially video, and to start to pull structured information from that unstructured data, right? And there are a couple of different things that I think that’s really going to help to drive. One is as we talk about automation and we talk about feeding those predictive models, that structured data that’s needed to feed that, you know, you’re not having to spend so much time getting to the data. It’s easier to help make decisions. So I consider that insights, right? So how can I help drive insights with the generative AI? The other thing that is really exciting and that we’re seeing obviously is starting to help drive actions, right? And this gets to the heart of automation. It’s one thing to be able to automate routing and get things to the right people and have certain things that go out in email. It’s another as we get further and further down the road to be able to have the technology sort through all the files and instantly raise not only, Hey, this is one you need to pay attention to, but this is one you need to pay attention to. Here’s why and here are the suggested possible actions. Right? And you don’t lose the concept of the human, but but I think that’s going to be really powerful. Brandon, what are you seeing at Inspiring in regards to AI? And I’d be curious, do you feel like this is the moment for more of the analytics piece, or do you think we’re ready for that action oriented piece? You know, I I think, that the comment about it being really geared toward, you know, having the human element and the human assisted is is really kinda where we’re at. I think it is, able to be implemented, you know, and and admittedly at Inspiring, we haven’t really put much time on the predictive analytics or or AI in in the workers’ compensation front. But we we have done a good bit in both of these technologies and things like, you know, medical coding, billing, and in the payment space. So I I know that they can be very powerful tools. And in talking with, you know, Chris and with Origami that there’s, many, use cases available on the underwriting and claims side really along the entire insurance value stream. So, you know, I I think we are kind of at this point where we need to see that marriage, I think, between technology gains and efficiencies and and technology aided decision making, like Chris mentioned, and really the the human touch. You know? We’re not we’re not looking for things to necessarily replace people, you know, with technology, but it’s more about increasing output and value, from individuals and and from teams. And that that’s really where we’re, you know, excited about seeing some of the the recent use cases and things like that. You know? And and I think in the work comp space, Carla can probably attest to this just, you know, given the subject matter expertise. But, work comp’s unique because it’s a compulsory buy. Everybody has to buy it. Everyone has to have it. There’s so much data available, and it’s standardized right across all states, all industries. And so the amount of data, I think, just makes it, you know, really good target for for AI, for predictive analytics. So, you know, what’s what we’re really focused on at Inspiring is we’re interested in seeing how our partners are really using the technology, know, and how is NCCI, using predictive analytics in the rate making? How is our independent actuary using, using predictive analytics to, better predict, you know, our outcomes and our claims and our IBNR, kind of beyond old school traditional actuarial methods. Our medical case managers, investigation units better detecting fraud with the use of, you know, AI to to better monitor, certain claims. So that that’s really where we’re spending a lot of time is trying to align our partnership interests. Yeah. I I mean, I think the the human, oversight is definitely an important part of that message and, marrying AI with the with the teams that are in place. Very, very important. And such an interesting point about the standardization of in workers’ comp and how how right that potentially makes leveraging of AI with with that suite of data. Carla, anything to add in in your perspective on on AI at Pie? Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, plus one to everything that Brandon and Chris said. But I think if you really lean into the line of business itself for workers’ compensation, that line of business has been really slow on the uptake. When you think about the adoption of AI predictive models, we’re seeing being used a little bit more frequently, but it’s such a highly regulated space. Most insurers have a low risk tolerance for, you know, really getting into the deep automation and AI opportunities that are out there. And I think as an industry, we’re slowly coming into the realm of realizing we can remain compliant. We can have very meaningful guardrails and checks and balances in how we leverage AI without necessarily crossing that line of the risk. Because workers’ comp, I mean, all lines are regulated, right? But workers’ comp in particular is so penalty driven, sanctions driven. I think as an industry, we’re slowly embracing the idea of pulling it in and feeling safe with how we’re implementing as long as we follow those important guardrails that I was talking about. So I do definitely see that there’s an evolution that’s happening, at least in the workers’ comp line of business, to really get in there and do some more meaningful use cases. I actually looked at a company that has AI nurses right now, and they specialize in very specific types of cases like postoperative care for a knee or pre op or nutrition. And these nurses that are AI granted, we’re not moving forward with that at this moment, but it’s something that in the future, I think we’re going to start to see much more frequently. They’re very conversational. They display things that you wouldn’t expect in terms of responses in some of the the demo recordings that we’ve seen. So there’s definitely an evolution happening in this line of business in particular to embrace the use of AI a bit more readily. I think, Carla, you highlight another thematic about A. I, which is everyone moves along at their own pace. Right. And I love the idea of the guardrails you outlined. But the AI nurse of it all gives me pause. But we’ll all get there at some point. Right? Like Fascinating. Yep. Like, each human and each organization moves along, at at their own pace. So, like, on the topic of technology kind of moving, away from the AI topic, Brandon, for you in in speaking specifically to cloud based core systems, how have you leveraged those to enhance kind of that straight through processing and and improve your operational efficiency? Yeah. So our core system really supports probably ninety percent of our daily production type tasks. Everything we do is is built on really our availability of our core system and and accessibility of of where, and when we need to access our data. So, we’re fully commercial. You know, we don’t do any, you know, personal lines. It’s entirely, you know, more larger scale commercial, and so most of our business is is agent driven. So from the front end perspective, you know, we’re using our system to make sure that all of our information is readily available. We have all of our customer touch points, things like leads, you know, sales leads, quotes, opportunities, finds, historical information, applications, all of that’s available to us. It’s all being housed in that central point of contact, which I think, you know, Carla had mentioned earlier. So because of that, we’re not really relying on any legacy hosted systems or anything, from multiple platforms. We just do everything that we need to do in, you know, a single platform, all cloud based. So it’s it’s very important for us. You know, we have our loss control and our risk management, teams. They put all of their work into the course the core platform as well. Surveys they do, questions they get, mock examinations that they do for our customers, all the things like that. So it helps us to quantify, I think, the value that we add to them to to our customers as policyholders where they’re taking advantage of our services versus those that are not. And we can try to play around with some of the correlations between those that are taking advantage of our services and their experience and their their loss experience as well. Because we do a lot of large commercial and that’s large commercial space, straight through processing has been somewhat difficult to implement for us. We’ve got that classic eighty twenty rule. About eighty percent of our premiums come from about twenty percent of our policyholders. We have a lot of smaller individual insureds, so we are looking for a way to implement some straight through processing currently. But it’s gotta be kind of fit in that box, for for it to really, you know, be clean and and work for us. So, you know, that that’s really what we’re looking at. It’s all in the infancy for Inspirian. But as we continue to grow, it’s important for us to really find ways to make it easier for our customers and our our partners to do business with us. That’s the goal. Leveraging technology for that excellent user experience for sure. Carla, for you on the from a claims perspective, do you see similar similar benefits or is it a different perspective? It’s similar. I will say similarly, we are relatively new with our implementation of Origami, but our high level vision really is to use a combination of data extraction and ingestion into the system with a layer of decisioning AI to create some automated actions. That’s going to help drive some of that straight through processing that we’ve been talking about. It’s going to drive efficiencies. We have various integrations that we have included with our implementation for Origami. So we have these APIs, and we plan to add a few more. And we really view them as one ecosystem. It’s it’s meant to communicate cohesively with Origami being the system of the the source of truth, really, that captures all of the information that can help inform some of the actions that happen with those other external vendor partner integrations as well. The idea behind it is that ecosystem is going to help us drive more proactive, consistent decisioning on our automation rules as we move through that build out. Just one thing to click in on there, what does that AI decisioning look like in that specific ecosystem? Yeah. So for example, there are certain things that we’ve talked about that are just wrote, if A plus B, then C happens. Right? But there are other things that require a bit more strategic thought. And so some of the things that we’re looking at is decision management tools where we can actually teach A. I. And A. I. Learns to capture various different factors and inputs to make decisions that human beings would normally make on things like benefit delivery, on things potentially having to do with strategy or authorizations for certain types of requests. There’s a linear component to it, and then there’s some complexity, and that’s where decisioning comes in on the AI on the AI front. And it’s again, I go back to the whole risk tolerance and compliance, and that’s still at the core of everything that we need to look at when we’re building these things. And so getting a high level of confidence in the decisions that are coming out of that AI layer is going to be critical before we move forward with the next and next use case. That’s excellent. And thank you for indulging me on on that additional detail. Chris, from from your kind of broader perspective, what are you seeing? Industry wide, what you certainly see is a trend even among the the legacy vendors that were traditionally hosted locally. They’ve all started their kind of migrations and trying to get clients into the cloud, and there’s a reason. Right? So as a system that was born in the cloud, we we’ve been cloud since day one. The you know, a couple words or or things that I’ve heard. Right? We talk about leverage. Right? And they’re certainly being able to leverage technology, but there’s another kind of leverage, and that’s the leverage that we gain from an innovation perspective for our entire client base, right? So because all of our clients are and always have been on the same version of the system, new innovation, new features that are released, new partnerships that are added to the ecosystem, know, where we are constantly searching for vendors that are doing innovating things and adding to the ecosystem. All of that functionality becomes available to all of our clients as soon as it’s rolled out, right? So they’re able to take advantage of constant innovation and updates without disrupting their day to day operations, right? Which is really, really key. So you you you have that sort of constant innovation, that constant from the vendor perspective, us being the vendor, providing those new features, those new partnerships, the the tools that let you do your jobs better. And and I would say the second piece is just the ability to to configure, to adapt, to to keep the system flexible, and to constantly evolve is much easier in modern, you know, low code count low code, no code cloud systems so that when you are looking at new workflows or new ways to do things in an innovative fashion, whether it’s incorporating a new partner, whether it’s just building a new workflow, you know, natively internally, you’re able to do those things in a much shorter timeframe, right? Constantly executing on ideas to benefit your clients and your business in in a faster way. And and we’re seeing both of those be true benefits to to our entire client base. Yeah. I I mean, the the trend of cloud transformation has definitely become popular and is is pivotal to many, many insurers. I think we’ve heard from you all, on some really excellent cases of of leveraging a core platform to to manage those complexities, reporting regulations, etcetera, and and do that a lot more efficiently, effectively. I think for the for the audience, though, I think, people also like to know from your perspective some of the challenges with workers’ compensation and and how more specifically the technology has helped you overcome those challenges. Carla, will you get us kicked off on on that question? Yeah. I’d be happy to. So we talked a lot about the rising cost of claims and severity. So I won’t go into that too much because we’ve we’ve discussed the importance of efficiency and being able to contain those costs. And we’ve also talked about late reporting of claims and potentially, you know, with respect to technology, we have to make things easy for policyholders. We have to make their experience as seamless as possible. We, for example, at PIE, we focus on small businesses and we really work to empower them through the whole process. And that means it should not be a very difficult process for them to report a loss when one occurs. So having a platform such as, you know, a portal online or something that they can access on their cell phone to very quickly report a claim and then get the callback is is critical to to finding ways to make things easy in terms of technology. But when you really think about some of the challenges that we have as an industry, it’s the complexities around each of the different requirements from a compliance standpoint across all different states. They all have their nuances. We as an industry have to stay on top of the changes, be experts in what they mean and how to interpret them. Going back into that topic of risk management and making sure that we have that compliance in place. So AI can really be used to source and feed real time regulatory updates and information, make that available to adjusters. And again, just another, you know, tool in their belt, if you will, to just have the information readily there as opposed to spending hours sourcing it or depending on, you know, a publication to send you an email that says, you know, this this issue is changing. And then beyond that, I would say fraud detection. That’s huge. And I think we can really leverage fraud predictive models, but also red flag recognition through a combination of either business rules within the system, which, you know, we’ve actually configured that in origami, but also analyzing large data sets. I think, you know, Chris was talking about it a little bit earlier, but it’s important for us to be able to use AI to really analyze large data sets to find anomalies, find trends that could point to potential fraud so that we can very quickly jump on that and start investigating. That’s fascinating. The the fraud example, Chris, for you, what opportunities for you, you know, exist, and then how have you leveraged technology to solve those? Carla touched on a couple of these. One of the things that certainly, you know, as a technology vendor who sits, in a place where we’re working with clients across both claims and underwriting and even in multiple segments that we talked about earlier, whether it’s carriers or TPAs or even on the self insured side we work with clients. Compliance is a challenge for everyone, right, and to the extent that we can centralize and automate most of that compliance and take that off of the plate of the adjuster, of the plate of the individual client, there’s tremendous benefit to that, right? It lets them focus on actually adjudicating the claim and less on the particular rules that they have to follow or the particular form that needs to go out or the letter notification that needs to be sent in a certain period of time, right? So coupling the automation capabilities with the actual compliance component and not having to think about that for our clients is really important. It lets them focus on the job that they have at hand. So that’s certainly one of the challenges that we see, you know, a benefit across all of our clients. Think another one is our clients are all under a lot of pressure to do more with less, right? So we talk about driving down loss ratios, trying to reduce the severity of claim. You need to touch claims faster to do that. We know that we do. But most of our clients are operating in an environment where they’re worried about just the number of staff that they have. There’s attrition in the industry. There’s, you know, hiring new adjusters. It’s not always easy to replace adjusters that leave. You’ve got to really think about efficiency and leveraging the technology to help you solve some of the problems that aren’t necessarily a technology problem, right? But technology can help be a part of the solution and we’re seeing that with our clients as well. Chris, can we like, that last statement was so good. It was do you remember what you just said? It was Leveraging tech so the the problems aren’t necessarily technology problems, but we can leverage technology to be a part of the solution. I love that so so so much. I think sometimes when we’re talking about technology and AI and big data, it like, my mind at least goes to kinda like the efficiency and unlocking efficiency. And I think this team, Carla, you have it in play, and and Chris, you’re talking about kind of all the applications. Like, it just it’s so much bigger than I think the yesteryear of of how technology can be used. Brandon, any anything to add to the conversation from a operations and underwriting perspective? Fine. I appreciate what you said, Chris, and and I I tend to think you you’re thinking of Inspirian when you make your your comment about, you know, leveraging the technology to to really solve for, you know, doing more with less because I, you know, I think We’ve gone through some growth where we’ve really needed to rely on technology to to get us through it. And, you know, in in in in a, aging industry, you know, we’re all aware of of the, you know, coming aging gap of the inspiring excuse me, the insurance industry. You know, I think it’s really important people are are focused on being able to do more, with with less with less resources and and especially the challenges that we have today in in workers’ compensation. You know, our business biggest challenge, from an underwriting perspective is is really on the the continued pricing pressures that we have and decreasing rates, and that just continues to put pressure on elevated loss ratios. So, really, where can you impact in the business, ends up being pretty heavily dominated in the expense ratio for for that reason. And so because we’re in such a competitive market right now and especially where we operate, primarily in Alabama, we have a number of self insured group funds that really, dominate the market. And so we’re finding because of the ever decreasing rates, we’re finding fewer and fewer quoting opportunities for for new business because our insureds are continuing to get rate decreases. And so they’re they’re happy with their coverage that they’re getting today. So how do we position ourselves for future growth and to stand out? And that’s really where we’re looking for technology is the answer to that. We are, you know, really looking to to, leverage technology in the distribution, chain. We’re looking for technology to make it easier for prospective customers to do business with us, for agents to do business with us. So when the market does actually turn, you we can start to reel in the new business that we’ve continued to foster those relationships with agents and with customers. One of the ways that we’re doing that is through application ingestion that helps us to take, for example, competitor applications and easily and readily map it to our own applications. And in doing that, just helps to streamline the process for actually obtaining quotes and providing coverage for insureds. And so kinda goes back to the earlier questions and the topics we’ve been talking about really around automation and straight through processing. Brandon, it sounds like for you I mean, you go you’re far along that journey. Right? Strategy, process, implementation to navigate what sounds like a very competitive marketplace for you all. I think the the audience, will probably for both of you actually, Carla and Brandon, would love probably to hear more about your transformation journey. Right? So maybe there’s someone out in the audience who is starting this journey midway through the journey. It’s always awesome to benchmark. So what prompted you to search for a cloud vendor, and in what ways have your businesses benefited? Sure. And I I don’t think we have a real particularly unique story. I think, you know, we’ve been around for for a while, you know, in in the industry, as a company. So somewhat of a, you know, kinda middle aged, I guess, I would say. You know, not not quite legacy, but certainly not a not a newer entrant. And so, you know, we’ve been, working through our own homegrown work comp, and and liability system that we had built since we started in two thousand three. It’s not cloud native. It’s very clunky. The UI UX was terrible. Just kinda what you would expect, I think, from the turn of the millennium technology at that time. So the vendor that we had that built that ended up, closing their doors, and they they went bankrupt. And so it kinda left us high and dry, and that was in the two thousand fourteen, two thousand fifteen time frame. And what we ended up having to do, we made things work with the whole shoestring duct tape, approach. And, unfortunately, at that time, we were also starting to accelerate our growth. We were, executing our strategy to go into new lines of business, new states. And as we were growing, so was our overhead. It was ballooning at the pretty much the same rate. So it really was not allowing us to achieve any type of scale. So in two thousand seventeen, we set out to to look and see what’s out there from a a new system perspective. We knew we wanted cloud native. That was first and foremost. That was a given and and really, you know, starting to to be the the newer companies where it was the table stakes, so to speak, for example. We needed something that was flexible, the ability for us to self administer a good amount as we change rates or change forms, things like that that we could do by ourselves. Supporting multiple lines of business, supporting multiple states, we needed a number of integrations to to help with our compliance and our our claims vendors and partners. So I think and then lastly, based on our size, we needed it not to be super expensive. We needed to be something that we could afford. So we’ve vetted through four or five different platforms, and we found that Origami really checked all the boxes. The implementations are always tough. I’ve been through several, but I think having a good implementation team really made all the difference for us. So, yeah, I mean, I I think the success of the implementation for us really was able to were we able to accomplish what we had set out there using and finding a vendor that could check all the boxes for us? So what we were able to accomplish since then with Origami was the ability to really grow, and substantially grow without really increasing our overhead. In fact, we were able to shrink our overhead and then took our technology spend down by about thirty five percent from what we were spending in the two thousand seventeen time frame to where we are today because of the use of the technology in the core platform and and the the the courses the cloud native systems that we’ve been putting up with Origami. That might become our new tagline, enabling growth while reducing overhead. I’m loving that story. Carla, on on your side, what is your transformation journey looked like? So ours is a little different. So while I wouldn’t necessarily classify pie as a startup anymore, we are relatively you, so we’ve been in business since twenty seventeen and so while it’s always been the plan to manage our own claims, historically we had our claims managed by a third party administrator. We had a TPA handling it. If you think about what our mission is, it’s to empower small businesses to thrive by making commercial insurance affordable and as easy as pie. Well, that has to also include how we give them a claims experience that is easy and seamless, and that means managing the claims in house. So we decided back in twenty twenty two to start the build out of our internal claims operation. Part of that was, hey, we need a claims platform in order to manage our claims. And it was just a decision of whether we wanted to build one ourselves or partner with a platform like Origami. What we were really looking for was flexibility as we scale a platform that would enable us to provide excellent customer service and wouldn’t take years to implement. Those were the key factors for us. We wanted to get it done well, and we wanted to get it done quickly and have a platform that could support our growth plans and the scaling of the claims operation and the business in general. So really, that’s how we came to the decision that, you know, Origami is going to be a great partner for us. And the build out of our claims operation has included the implementation of this platform, and we continue to iterate on it now. So we have our road map of the next phases of the implementation. Some of the things that we talked about today that we have in our line of sight. But really, was an evolution of our business as well. Like I said, to to start from scratch with a brand new platform that we brought into the into the business. It’s interesting. Well, those are two very different stories, both organizations leveraging the Origami platform to help really drive that growth, which is which is excellent. Chris, like I said, we heard two very different stories. Anything to add things that we hear from other clients, that would be important in this conversation? I I think that I would I would tip my hat a little bit to Brandon and his team. You know, the the success of implementations is not just based on the vendor you choose. It’s based on how ready you are. It’s the homework that that as a as a client, as an insurance carrier, you’ve put into thinking through what is it we’re trying to accomplish with this project, right? And not trying not trying to have it be everything that everyone wants because that’s not always possible, right? But to say here’s what we’re focusing on as we roll out the system and we recognize that we don’t have to think of every scenario that we’re ever going to encounter and get it built into the original project because with a cloud based system like Origami, it can continue to evolve with you. Your business is going to adapt and change. So it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you want it well defined with clearly stated objectives and I know in both cases, with PIE and with Inspirion, you know, they’ve been great partners who really understood kind of from the from the beginning what the objective of the project was, what the requirements were, you know, what their goals were, and ultimately, both recognize that it was not the endpoint. Right? The end of implementation does not mean the end of innovation. It’s just the starting point for it. It’s such a good note on the importance of partnership of it all between Origami and vendors and then that impact on on the project. It’s it’s incredibly important. Strongly agree. So there’s probably insurers out there that are looking to leverage cloud transformations and digital approaches. We’ve talked about a lot of the positive benefits. I’m sure there’s been some best practices and learnings in both of the journeys that we’ve outlined. What would you say, Chris, that are some common pitfalls insurers face when implementing new core platforms for workers’ compensation, and maybe some tips on how to avoid said pitfalls. I think one of them is is sometimes, you know, you want to please everybody in an organization. Right? You bring in way too many folks to a project who have each coming with their own perspective, different stakeholders from different departments. You want a good cross representation, but what you don’t want to do is bring in so many people that you have voices that are stepping over each other and it becomes difficult to determine, okay, what’s the actual path to solution? So I think being prepared internally, understanding that there are trade offs that every group that comes to the table is going to make, right? So everybody wants their system to be better and exactly the same when they start this transformation, meaning they don’t want any change, but they want everything to be better, right? And we know that those things aren’t possible. They’re at odds. So it’s managing expectations of the team internally. Good change management is critical. Our most successful implementations are well thought out upfront in defining requirements and well thought out in how we actually roll this out and get adoption among our user base. And ultimately, there’s a couple things to focus on when you’re doing that. One of them is obviously, can we do everything we need to do to make our business? And can we gain some wins for each of those groups? Can we take some of the pain that they felt from the antiquated system that they’re using or the manual process that they’re currently following and and give them wins in the process. Those things really help in adoption. That makes sense. Brandon, for you, if if you could turn back the clock and identify pitfalls and how to avoid them, what would that be for you? Yeah. Well, I I think I just heard Chris call us the most successful implementation, so I’m not sure that I’m I’m the person to speak on that. But, I I have to echo what he said, you know, really around the the documentation and and the communication. I think the biggest pitfall, really will revolve around documentation and having all of your ducks in a row. I think the challenge is that you have people, in the industry who know a lot about transacting insurance, and they have all this knowledge in their head. And then on the other side, you’ve got these great, technology people who know how to implement, who know how to, you know, code and and design a great product. And being able to translate those two different but same languages, is always going to be, I I think, a struggle. And and to do that, it’s all about the documentation. We we have laughed, you know, internally before with the whole, you guys might be familiar with, like, the tree swing cartoon where you talk about this is what, you know, how the client described it. This is how, you know, the product manager interpreted it. This is how they explained it to the, you know, programmer. And at the end of the day, this is really what the client wanted. And it’s just two or three or four different visuals totally different about how a tree swing, you know, sits on a tree. And I think that that’s really, you know, if you’re familiar with that and familiar with visual and the concept, really what we’re talking about having those requirements all well documented, signed off at the appropriate levels. And I think, you know, you get into some common pitfalls about overpromising. There’s frustrations that are often felt really on on all sides. So getting everything clearly articulated, signed off about what’s being requested, translated into a business requirements document, is really going to be the the best way to overcoming one of those pitfalls that, that that that we’ve seen. I have seen that cartoon, and it is very funny. And and just to reinforce communication and documentation, we definitely see that as as one of the critical success factors. Carla, how about for you? Yeah. Definitely, there’s a theme here because top of mind for me is always requirements. One of the biggest pitfalls for an implementation is just unclear requirements. You have to be meticulously specific about them. And I think making assumptions that something is understood or again, I guess it goes back to the tree swing. Making those assumptions is a very bad idea. It’s always important just to make sure that, yes, it’s completely understood. Things that maybe we think about coming out of the box in a platform, maybe the definition of out of the box is not exactly the same. We have to be clear about all of those things, and that’s one of the great experiences that we had with Origami is as we went through and discussed requirements, we were so diligent about unpacking what we mean by the requirements. I would also say that not thinking beyond the now is a pitfall. When you’re thinking about where you want to go. It’s important to have that clear understanding, because even if we don’t roll out all the functionality in the first iteration, it’s important for everybody on both sides of the Feds to understand where we’re going, because you’re laying the foundation for those next steps with that initial implementation. And I would also say that one of the most important things is comprehensive testing. And I love I love to see the component testing, the regression testing, UAT being carried out in a very organized, detailed manner. That’s really what’s going to get you to the point where you can really feel confident that the build out is just as expected or at least as close to expected. And getting that user experience, I think Chris talked about change management, is so critical. But having that testing upfront, I think really helps with that experience when you have the rollout for your end users and as they move through kind of just the overall management of change as well. Absolutely. I love the thinking beyond the now and the testing. Really, really great ads. So we’ve talked a lot about the documentation to help kind of align the teams. I want to acknowledge in any of these implementations, right, it takes a full team. And so I think my next question is in terms of all the the stakeholders that might have expectations for the implementation, how do you manage that? So we’ve talked about documentation, but what other insights or guidance would you provide on managing stakeholders, Brandon? Yeah. I think for me, it’s all about over communicating, at all stages of the implementation. I don’t think you can really communicate enough to the stakeholders. And I that’s where a top notch program manager can really come in handy. Their job is really to focus on the needs of the business and distilling all of that information during the implementation into, you know, bite sized digestible nuggets. You know, I used to have a a project manager that always referred to eating the elephant, right, one bite at a time. And so, you know, I think, this person needs to make sure that the stakeholders are aligned when the goals are set, the budget and timelines are good. And if there’s anything that comes out of that that are that are not good, that we’re communicating that as early as possible raising the red flag. So, you know, I think that success can look different kinda depending on who the stakeholder is and and what their goals are. But I think having a strong leader, in in in being able to overcommunicate and set the expectations is really, key for managing stakeholders. Carla, what was your strategy for managing stakeholder expectation? Yeah. We actually follow a pretty detailed up and robust collaboration and decision making framework at PIE. And part of that is anytime a project initiative implementation is is happening, individuals have specific roles in those. So you talk maybe about a project manager. They’re responsible for approaching any potential stakeholder and making sure that they either opt in to be a part of the requirements gathering, or they can just simply say, keep me updated from time to time. There are various levels of involvement for all of the different stakeholders that might be involved, but the framework really feeds into a continuous loop of feedback. So they are maintaining that level of of information of knowledge based on how they chose to show up for the for the project. You know, they can be somebody who’s an active participant or somebody who’s more like, read me in and I’ll give you some feedback before you finalize this thing. But for us, it was really helping to identify any potential stakeholders. It’s it’s something that too much is never enough, right? So anybody can opt out and say, no, you’re good. Just just move on. But for us, it’s a question of being complete and getting all of the necessary feedback when we’re moving through these types of decisions or implementations so that we’re hopefully solving for as many needs as possible and and avoiding some of the potential pitfalls that can happen if we forget a key stakeholder when we’re moving through these decisions. That’s always a real bummer when that happens. Can take you backwards. Painful bummers for sure. Exactly. It sounds like both of you are super aligned on making sure communication is happening at every single stage. Super important. And that communication is king. And then, Carla, I thought it was really interesting this I’m very keen on project management, but this, like, opt in and kind of choose your engagement is a really interesting approach that that Pie is taking. So thank you so much for for sharing that. Absolutely. Chris, from the origami perspective, are there additional ways that origami kind of helps support communications, stakeholder management? So I I think part of communication is you have to be equally willing to communicate good news and not so good news, right, during during a process. And with individual stakeholders that might be, hey, the thing that you said you need by this date is going to take longer and here’s why. It might be this thing that you said you think you need to have is not something we’re going to implement and here’s why, right? There’s a better way to handle it, we’re focusing on the business. I think communication is certainly the key but I think expectation starts upfront, right? And it starts with here’s what you’re getting and here’s what you’re not getting and here’s the timeframe and then it’s the willingness and ability to deliver all news as quickly as possible. It may even be more important to deliver the not so good news faster because then you can plan for it a little further in advance, adapt to the change. You know, we said it earlier, Brandon hit the nail on the head, and implementations are never easy, right? It is a challenge to replace the, you know, the heartbeat of an operation, right? The system on which you run your business. It’s it’s a complex project. And so constant communication, quick communication, and and certainly the the willingness to deliver good and bad news equally quickly. I think, Chris, what I’m hearing from your answer too is is the like, delivering the why along with the what, like, whether it’s the good news or the bad news, but kind of in whether you’re on the internal client facing side or the vendor side, just being really direct, being really timely, and giving that why along with the what. Yep. So as we think about, again, other insurers that might be looking to select a core platform specifically designed for workers’ compensation, of course, what guidance, Carla, would you give? I think the the most critical piece of advice would be to look for solutions that are flexible, that can grow with you and can work in support of your overall business objectives of your values as a company. As an example, at Pie, we prioritize vendor partnerships who also put the customer at the core of everything. That aligns with our values. It aligns with our business objectives. And so I I think that’s that’s key is really finding that alignment and that partnership and the flexibility so that you can continue to grow and scale. Excellent. And Brandon, for you, what advice would you share? I agree with Carla. The the flexibility and the partnership is is key. She had also mentioned something earlier on about, kind of beginning with the end in mind. So thinking forward, not just thinking about the right now. So, you know, I think you’ve got to know what it is that you need for your core system. But you have to go beyond that, and you have to go further than what’s normal that you’re doing today. So, you know, we approached it, and we we can approach all of our innovation innovation, with the thought that technology can literally do anything that you want it to do. And and if that’s the case, what would your ideal end state look like if you could have it do anything? And what we found, you know, especially in working with origami, that nine times out of ten, that can be achieved and accomplished within your core platform provider and at least within the current insurance ecosystem that you work within. And I found that, you know, nine times out of ten if you don’t start with the end in mind, then you’re really taking the long way, the long path. So I think, you know, if you’re just now looking at going to market and looking for a, you know, cloud native, core provider that really understand what it is that you’re looking for, and test it, you know, stress test it, figure out where where you can really extract the most value from, from from providers because I think you’ll find, that there’s not as much flexibility in in many partners out there, and and more flexibility in others. There’s so many good quotes from today. Like, keeping the end in mind, otherwise, you might be taking the long way. A lot of a lot of good guidance, both quotes and very specific guidance. So thank you for that, Brandon. Well, I have to give that a tip on the end in mind. That’s a that’s a atomic habit for Stevie Kobe, so that’s that’s not a a Brandon quote. Fooled me. Chris, how about for you? What what advice would you provide? So I I I think one of the thing that’s really important, it’s both when when a when you go out to evaluate vendors and and you’re thinking about your own business, and and both Carla and Brandon touched on this. It’s it’s the keeping the future in mind thing. Don’t just think about the last five or ten years and that’s, you know, your own business for the last five or ten years or the vendor and what they’ve done for the last five or ten years. Look at where you wanna be in the next five or ten years and the capability of the vendor to support where you’re going, right, not where you’ve been. I think that’s really important to keep that that future looking perspective in mind. I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of this is what we do and we need to recreate this and this vendor has recreated things like that in the past and so this will be really great. And then what you end up with is technology that doesn’t support the the agility, that you need in your business, you know, for the next five years. And so look don’t look back five or ten years. Look forward. Yeah. I I think on the topic of technology and just the the landscape of it all, things move faster today than ever before. So, yeah, for solving for the future and that scalability and growth, I could see that being such an important important consideration and piece of advice. You all, this has been absolutely excellent. We really appreciate all of our panelists, Carla, Chris, Brandon. You all have been so transparent with us, sharing your valuable insights and experiences today. We’ve covered so much ground from journeys to challenges to opportunities to ways to think about solving those things. Just so much value there. I hope for our audience that this discussion today has been super enlightening and that there’s something to take away for every single person, new ideas and pragmatic next steps on how to bring the transformative power of technology to support sustainable profitability in your workers’ compensation practice. From from my perspective, the key to success in this ever evolving market is really, to Chris’s point, to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging technology and adopting best practices that align with your particular organization’s goals, again, not only for today, but for tomorrow. So once more, I wanna thank our panelists, Inspiron, PI Insurance, Origami for all the contributions, and thank you to all of our attendees for joining us today. We encourage you to continue the conversation and explore how these things can be applied within your own organization. And if you have any further questions or would like to contact, us or our panelists, you can reach out to info at origami risk dot com. Thank you all so much for joining. We look forward to seeing you at future webinars, and have a wonderful day. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.