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Insurance Innovation at the Speed of a Pizza
Business Transformation without the Wait
Read Time: 5 Minutes
A few weeks ago, I was sitting with the management team of a travel insurance company discussing a new product idea.
They wanted to introduce a Platinum coverage option for expensive personal belongings such as gravel bikes, professional cameras and other high-value equipment. Instead of reimbursing customers based on the depreciated value of the item, the new product would restore them to the situation they were in before the loss—by replacing the object with the same model or an equivalent modern version.
It was exactly the kind of innovation insurers know they need: a proposition that creates a noticeably better customer experience and differentiates the brand in a competitive market.
Then came the question that usually slows everything down.
Everyone in the room already knew the traditional answer. New products typically need requirements analysis, IT development, integrations, testing, release planning and governance approvals. Even a limited pilot can easily take several months before the business sees the first concrete result.
Instead of answering with an estimate, I proposed a small experiment.
I asked them a different question:
They laughed. Someone said, “About twenty minutes.”
“Good,” I replied. “Let’s see if we can build a working version of your new insurance product in roughly the same amount of time.”
What We Had Available
The insurer already possessed three things:
- the draft policy conditions for the new Platinum product (PDF documents),
- structured information about existing travel insurance contracts,
- and historical customer claim statements, also in PDF format.
In most organizations, connecting these different types of information would immediately become an IT project.
This time, it did not.
Using the new AI capabilities of the Trisotech platform, we configured an AI-powered claims environment directly from the business side. No software development was required. No coding was involved.
Within a few minutes, an AI Agent was configured and instructed —in plain language— to act as an experienced travel claims specialist. We then created a simple business flow that asked the AI to analyse the policy conditions, the customer contract and the claim statement, and to determine all information needed for a claims assessment.
Was the policy active? Was the customer covered? Did the incident occur during the insured period? Was the object eligible for the new Platinum treatment? Were all special conditions satisfied?
The AI extracted the information and explained its reasoning. The final acceptance and compensation decision was then applied automatically according to the insurer’s business rules.
The entire solution was deployed and executed in about twenty minutes.
By the time a pizza ordered at a nearby restaurant would have arrived on our table, the insurer was already simulating historical claims against a completely new insurance product.
Why This Matters
At first sight, this sounds like a story about AI.
It is not.
It is a story about removing the waiting time between an idea and a business experiment.
For years, insurers have been trapped in a frustrating pattern. Business teams generate innovative ideas, but implementation depends on lengthy development cycles. As a result, many promising concepts are postponed, reduced in scope, or abandoned before they are ever tested with real data.
What a platform like Trisotech changes is not only the speed of automation—it changes the speed of learning.
When a business team can validate a product idea in the time it takes to have lunch, the economics of innovation become fundamentally different.
- More ideas are tested.
- Fewer ideas require large upfront investments.
- Business experts regain direct control over experimentation.
- IT can focus on enterprise enablement instead of becoming the bottleneck for every product change.
In other words, innovation stops being a quarterly event and becomes a daily operational capability.
The Five Steps of the Pizza Model
The reason the pizza analogy resonates so well with executives is that everyone intuitively understands it.
When you order a pizza, five things happen:
Building an AI-powered insurance solution with Trisotech follows almost the same sequence:
No technical literacy is required to understand this sequence. And that is precisely the point.
The Real Transformation
Most discussions about AI still focus on productivity: writing faster, analysing faster, answering questions faster.
The more profound transformation is something else entirely.
For the first time, a business executive can move from:
to:
within the same meeting.
That is not merely faster software delivery. It is a different operating model for innovation.
Insurance companies that master this capability will not necessarily win because they have the best AI model. They will win because they can test, refine and launch new products dramatically faster than competitors who remain dependent on traditional project cycles.
And that brings us back to the pizza.
The next time someone asks how quickly AI can create business value, I would avoid talking about large language models, orchestration engines or decision standards.
I would simply ask:
Because today, with Trisotech’s new AI capabilities, that may be all the time an insurer needs to turn a promising idea into a functioning business solution.
Do you want to try it out for yourself? Just let me know!
Follow Stefaan Lambrecht on his website.
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