Becoming an insurtech: How a leading insurance carrier set sights on providing next-generation, customer-friendly services 

As the world's largest market for risk management, the U.S. insurance industry is rich with thoughtful, analytical professionals. However, large legacy insurance carriers have been challenged to distinguish themselves among the crowded field of digitally native start-ups—often referred to as “insurtechs.” Using innovative technologies to streamline and enhance traditional insurance processes, insurtechs are nimble enough to seamlessly link marketing with underwriting, claims management, and customer service.

This shift can be difficult for large, established industry players. For ProAssurance, a leading national specialty property and casualty (SP&C) insurance provider focused on medical professional liability, it began after challenging a collaborative cohort of IT, Operations, and key business units to intelligently reimagine existing processes. With continued expansion of the ServiceNow AI Platform, they saw their organization move from siloed information and workflows to one supported by AI and powerful automation, with front-to-back business processes flowing smoothly around core workflows.

A strong alliance: ProAssurance begins their technology relationship with ServiceNow

When ProAssurance acquired NORCAL Insurance, an existing ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) customer, NORCAL helped ProAssurance recognize the power of ServiceNow to enable operational process innovation.. “The newly formed Digital Experience team worked with IT to enhance our help desk,” says Max Malloy, Vice President, Digital Experience & Strategy at ProAssurance. “They created a user-focused redesign that resulted in a welcoming service portal to connect employees from the merged companies. It became a lot easier to report technical issues and request IT resources, all in one place.”

On the heels of that success, the Digital Experience team selected ServiceNow Financial Services Operations (FSO) to modernize the original claims workspace and build a true end-to-end claims processing environment—from first notice of loss (FNOL) to claims resolution and reporting. The team also reimagined the underwriting workbench to include dynamic dashboards that give regional teams visibility into policy submissions, renewals, and endorsement (policy change) requests. With advanced underwriting and claims processing capabilities, ProAssurance delivers a more refined experience not only for policyholders, but also for independent agency partners.

With FSO managing policies, ProAssurance turned their focus to customer engagement and experience. Using ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), the insurer had an integrated solution for essential customer service operations, including credentialing, billing support, and general inquiries. Since both FSO and CSM are on the same ServiceNow AI Platform, ProAssurance has a unified view of their partners, customers, policies, and services, which they didn’t have previously.

Go with the flow: Gaining the trust and support of company stakeholders

Building on their solid service foundation, ProAssurance introduced "Flow," a strategic campaign that unified the many operational improvements in place throughout the business. A cornerstone of the approach was "Visualizing the Vision," which used engaging media images to clearly demonstrate how workflows, automation, and systems work together.

“Igniting imaginations and providing creative on-ramps for technical and internal business influencers to engage in, helped leaders and teams to understand the critical role they played in transforming to the new ‘Flow State’ with ProAssurance using ServiceNow,” says Max.

A cornerstone of the Flow initiative is for ProAssurance to share their intelligent automation with external partners and customers. This required a new service portal to realize the insurer’s vision. The Digital Experience team worked with ServiceNow Partners, NewRocket and Infocenter, to make this happen.

A next-gen insurance portal: ProAssurance brings modern self-service to agents and customers

The company replaced a hybrid homegrown/third-party legacy system—building an insurance portal based on the ServiceNow FSO Data Model to manage financial accounts and insurance policies—with remarkable results. According to Max, “This next-gen portal acts as a front door for ProAssurance independent insurance agency partners and customers to access many of the same thoughtfully orchestrated policy servicing, credentialing, account support, and knowledge resources that internal teams use.”

By adopting a unified platform that integrates AI, data, and workflows, ProAssurance was able to deliver a single portal for sales and customer service. Internally, the administration end of the portal is referred to as ‘Customer Central’, as it provides a single pane of glass and real-time monitoring, servicing, collaboration, and case resolution. “All of it is presented cleanly, consistently, and with real-time reporting and customer engagement channels that ensure disciplined communications among our Customer Experience & Engagement and Portal Support teams,” explains Max.

To manage the dynamic, active new flow of interactions, cases, incidents and more, ProAssurance realized that it needed a high-performance hybrid transactional and analytical processing database to support their foundation for AI. That's where ServiceNow RaptorDB Pro came in. The database technology was exactly what ProAssurance needed to handle their massive policy tables and years of customer data. Max recalls, “The results were immediate with RaptorDB Pro. Data that once took frustratingly inconsistent amounts of time to load now appears instantly. Case management is fluid and natural, without delays between steps. For customers and partners, this means faster service and more satisfying interactions.”

In fact, the overall performance gains translated into a 59% reduction in the compute time for user-initiated transactions. The UI SQL Time—the amount of time the user interface (UI) spent completing database queries (SQL)—was nearly 2.5 times faster. Team members immediately experienced significant time efficiencies in their day-to-day work.

The big idea: Agentic AI pilot programs

Constant innovation is part of the ProAssurance DNA, and is why they launched, and continue to develop, pilot programs using ServiceNow AI Agents. They quickly identified a practical use case for their new "Unified Knowledge" initiative. Led by the ProAssurance Instructional Design, Experience & Analysis (IDEA) team, they created a curated library of expert-verified knowledge base articles. These instructional resources not only provided clear guidance for people on the team but were also structured for AI-based systems to enhance efficiency in claims, underwriting, and administrative operations.

In addition, the Next-Gen ProAssurance Customer Portal program platformed ProAssurance Assist, which uses ServiceNow AI Agent Orchestrator to coordinate collaboration among teams of AI agents to successfully achieve specific goals. AI agent teams deliver better results than single AI agents, handling simple to complex workflows.

 ProAssurance Assist automatically ingests all support emails sent to the Portal team and creates templated responses. “AI agent orchestration not only provides proof of performance, but also energizes an already electrified organization around the legitimate, game-changing possibilities of agentic AI. That work had previously been handled by the Portal Support team and took up to ten minutes or more per email,” Max says. “This new agentic AI effort frees up time for team members to focus on more strategic activities.”

Max concludes, “It’s exciting to see how ProAssurance has evolved. It really resulted from a true partnership between the ServiceNow AI Platform team and the ProAssurance Digital Experience team. ServiceNow provided the building blocks for us to transform into a trusted industry player with the fresh, nimble, and intelligently re-designed technology foundation of a true insurtech. Together, we created use cases built on realistic timelines and goals.

“We are truly an organization pulsing with intelligent and integrated automation, AI-augmentation, and true back-to-front-end business orchestration—synthesized around core workflows on one, powerful, best-in-class platform—ServiceNow. The positive impacts were quick to realize, with our teams able to work smarter and our partners and customers receiving better services.”