Drawn by Definity’s clear vision and leadership, Tatjana Lalkovic (pictured) joined six years ago to fast-track its digital transformation. Today, with a cloud-based core, a 12-month data overhaul, and a landmark rollout of Gemini Enterprise to every employee, she shows how fusion teams, strategic partnerships, and a sharp customer focus are reshaping Canada’s P&C insurance market.
Tatjana Lalkovic never initially planned to work in technology. She had a creative side but was good at maths, and where she grew up it was important to study something practical. So she chose technology and discovered it was "an amazingly beautiful tool to enable very creative business transformation."
She spent most of her career in the financial industry, gravitating towards transformative initiatives: launching the first e-commerce foreign exchange trading platform, driving enterprise omnichannel transformation, and starting the global precious metals business for Canadian Banks. Cross-enterprise roles gave her exposure to insurance, but the full leap came in 2020.
Economical Insurance, now Definity, was preparing for demutualization and an IPO with a clear vision: become a digital leader in Canadian insurance. "Insurance typically is a little bit behind the banks with digital transformation," she says. "And it was an interesting challenge to join the team who has such a clear vision, to drive growth in insurance business and be a leader in the market."
Throughout her career, she's focused on explaining technology in plain business language. "It's super important to innovate with the business, finding the language to make it simple so they can really understand how technology can help the business grow and achieve the objectives that they set ahead of themselves."
When Lalkovic arrived, Definity had just built two signature digital platforms: Sonnet, direct-to-consumer, and Vyne, for the broker channel. But the challenge was taking it to the next level and building what she calls a digital core, the foundation to scale and continuous innovation.
"Innovation never stops. To stay relevant in the market, you need to continue to reinvent your business models and leverage technology to accelerate business outcomes. And to be able to do that, you have to have a strong digital core and platforms that enable you to innovate with agility, speed and in a cost-effective way."
That meant three critical initiatives. First, migrating platforms to cloud for resilience and scale. Second, organizing and governing data. "The insurance industry has a lot of data, and we are blessed that we have access to such a wealth of data. And our business really depends on how effectively we leverage data to price the risk and deliver the differentiating service to the customers and brokers."
Third was revamping "our API integration layer", critical for connectivity to brokers and the insurance ecosystem, embedded insurance partnerships and AI. To enable AI agentic systems today leveraging robust API capabilities is critical to deliver the data to the model.
Definity's philosophy is clear: partner where you don't differentiate, build where you do. "We believe that aligning ourselves to the right partners, who will have a focus on specific areas, and make significant investment to continuously improve it, is better for us.
Guisewire underpins the company’s digital platforms, Vyne and Sonnet as well as claims platforms - Lalkovic sits on Guisewire's advisory board. "We take interest to make our partners successful and help them build their roadmap to help us and for them to be successful."
In 2022, Definity partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its data transformation, completing it in "industry record time", less than 12 months. Completing it by early 2023 meant that "when acceleration of AI started with Generative AI and later on Agentic, it put us in a really strong position to start leveraging and delivering meaningful business value."
Coming from big banks, she knows how unusual this is. "Those data transformations take a long time with a huge spend, and very often they're not successful."
That strong position is now enabling Definity to take another significant step. Building on its data and cloud foundation, and their successful relationship with Google Cloud, the company is now deploying Gemini Enterprise to its entire workforce, making it one of the first in the Canadian P&C sector to scale such capabilities for all employees.
This initiative goes beyond simple task automation to reimagine end-to-end workflows. “By providing our employees with access to advanced agentic AI, we are fostering an AI-fluent workforce and creating a foundation for responsible innovation,” Lalkovic explained. The goal, she notes, is to empower employees and strengthen operational resilience, enabling teams to thrive by bringing cutting-edge AI tools into their everyday work.
Technology platforms are only part of the story. Culture is equally critical, specifically, what she calls "business/technology fusion teams" where business and technology staff share the same OKRs and outcomes.
"Sometimes you see technology and the business acting and delivering transformation as separate units. And that never creates as good results and outcomes that you can have when the business and technology teams come together. We got this right and I believe is part of our continued success.”
Lalkovic believes "the future relies on business people elevating their technology fluency, and technology people elevating their business fluency. And that merge is what we've done very well together at Definity."
Just as important is the approach to transformation. "We don't transform with technology only. We take an opportunity to revisit how we do the business and reimagine our business operating model so that we can extract the best value from that technology."
Simply automating existing processes delivers limited value. "But where you really move the dial, is when you leverage technology and reimagine how to do the business in a different way. That's where the benefits really accelerate."
The philosophy of empowerment is central to the company’s latest move: providing tools like Gemini to its entire workforce. It’s a tangible commitment to the idea that, as Lalkovic puts it, “AI will not replace people: people who use AI will replace people who don’t.”
Claims has been the proving ground. Over two to three years, Definity transformed its claims business in three phases, realizing all committed benefits.
"We didn't just say we're going to put it on a modern cloud platform with the tools, with Guidewire and AI. What we've done, we said, how would we reimagine the business to deliver best service to our customers? This is the moment of truth in the insurance industry. We don't buy insurance because we're exploring and shopping, we are buying insurance for that moment when we need it."
AI-driven sentiment analysis scans customer communications "to pick up the signals where there is an upset or critical issue for the customer so that we can prioritize and triage and be attentive to them." This augments adjusters "to prioritize their focus where it matters in the moment that it's going to make the most difference."
The results: "We significantly improved our NPS score, which is a testament of transformation focused on customer experience, while we improve our indemnity and loss ratios as key business financial metrics."
Ultimately, its motto drives transformation: "better, faster, cheaper."
Speed matters enormously. In commercial lines, "the company that gets the business is the company that responds to the quote fastest. And so it's not even competitiveness of your rate, it's actually how quickly you can respond with a good quote."
The goal is automating "tasks and work that is not necessarily valued, creating the space and capacity to actually focus on doing it in a differentiating way and providing that service."
While many insurers pilot AI, Definity has moved it into production across four areas.
In servicing: AI assistants support adjusters and call center agents. "We have enabled AI to listen to the conversation with customer or broker, contextualize the conversation, pull the relevant information from the disparate systems, and provide real time recommendation to our call center agent."
Call summarization alone saves "three to four minutes per call. Imagine this is one call, all the calls, every year, every day. That is a material productivity impact, but also a major improvement to employee and customer/broker experience. With the real time coach supporting our agents, they gain confidence and have more time to focus on delivering exceptional service and advice.
“It started with AI supporting and assisting our own employees, to gain confidence and build right guardrails before we expose conversational AI to our customers and brokers for simple service requests.”
In claims: Definity is building its first agentic system to support brokers submitting first notice of loss. "We now have AI agents taking unstructured data from brokers, structuring it, and initiating claim process in our claims platform. It also has agents that follow up an email to broker for any additional information required.”
In commercial lines: “We are making progress towards building agentic systems that will support submissions, perform triaging and initial risk scoring to accelerate quote response. This is not only productivity play but a growth opportunity as it allows us to respond to a greater number of quotes, driving business growth.”
In technology: AI transforms delivery itself. "AI is the first technology that disrupts technology profession in a major way." Testing efficiency improved 20%, system availability rose dramatically, and AI now reverse-engineers legacy applications to accelerate our transformation – better, faster, cheaper.
The data transformation was gruelling but revelatory. What surprised Lalkovic most was employee engagement afterwards. "We did employee engagement surveys after completing the data transformation on both the technology and business side and saw it rise, despite the challenging transformation work done in record time.
She attributes this to ensuring "every single one of our team members knows that they're part of something bigger and how the work they’ve done advances Definity’s vision."
The ongoing challenge is "flying the plane and changing the engine. So we are doing all of those underpinning digital transformations while we are transforming business in claims, in personal insurance, and we are acquiring the business and M&A."
What's coming over the next three to five years?
"I think AI is going to transform operating models and businesses in a big way and much faster than digital technologies did. If you think about how mobile technology evolved and we were all wondering, how are we going to use the phone to do everything? And now we are all carrying personal computers in our pockets. AI transformation is accelerating at a significantly higher pace.
She sees breakthroughs with reimagining business workflows leveraging agentic systems. Her prediction? "We will accelerate changing business models faster than ever before. And it's an exciting journey and we have to do it in a responsible way and bring people along."
Looking back over six years, Lalkovic returns to her core thesis: "For us to be a digital leader, and lead in digital transformation and AI, our digital core foundations are our advantage as it positions us to firmly to grow our business with agility, quality and scale.
Equally critical are "the culture that I talked about, which is very important and the credibility that comes from consistently delivering on our commitments. We are never done, but we know we are set up so we can continue to take challenges that are coming from emerging technology, and business models."
Outside work, Lalkovic's life centers on family and exploration. She's happily married with two daughters. "It's amazing. I take pleasure in seeing those young, what used to be young kids becoming really good humans and building their own lives and their careers."
Travel is a shared passion. The family takes one trip together yearly, while Lalkovic and her husband travel more frequently. She's an avid reader of professional material and fiction, and continues her passion for art and design. She practices Pilates to stay grounded. And there's Milo, the family dog with lots of energy keeping her active.
