The Problem Insurance Can't Articulate

I've been quiet on LinkedIn. Deliberately.

For the past several years, I've been head down — building platforms, leading transformation, proving architectures in production. Not much time for broadcasting when you're in execution mode.

Now I'm surfacing. One mission successfully concluding. Before the next begins, there's space to pause, reflect, and share.

Two things are happening in our industry right now worth reflecting on.

Zurich has made five bids for Beazley. All rejected. They've also acquired a stake. Two signals worth reading together. Zurich's persistence tells you that specialty is where the value is — a $47 billion P&C operation can see it, wants it, and won't stop pursuing it. Beazley's rejections tell you that specialty knows what it's worth and believes that value is best preserved independently. Both point to the same underlying truth: P&C and specialty are fundamentally different. Different business models, different data flows, different architectural assumptions. Carriers merge and discover this the hard way. Software vendors build for one paradigm and wonder why the other rejects their platform. I'd go further: most carriers don't fully understand the nuance themselves. They reorganise around it, acquire around it, but rarely articulate it. If the people writing the cheques can't define the problem, what chance do the vendors building the solutions have?

Which leads to AI. Every carrier, every vendor, every broker is "exploring use cases." But if the market can't address digital transformation at a foundational level — if the architecture is wrong before a line of code is written — then AI isn't transformation. It's a bandaid on a broken leg. The gap between having AI tools and AI genuinely changing how insurance operates isn't technology. It's methodology. And product leaders should be leading that conversation.

I've spent over two decades in enterprise transformation — telecommunications, emerging technologies, and deep in the global specialty and P&C insurance market. I've built the architectures, led the transactions, and seen where this industry gets it right and where it consistently gets it wrong.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be writing across three dimensions:

→ As a Chief Product Officer — how I lead transformation, and why most organisations get the sequence backwards

→ In insurance technology — the architectural problem the market doesn't know it has, and the civil war being fought inside every global carrier

→ On AI and methodology — why tool adoption isn't transformation, and what actually is

If any of that resonates, follow along. If you're building in these spaces and want to talk, I'm easy to find.

#ProductLeadership #EnterpriseTransformation #InsurTech #SpecialtyInsurance #AI