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In a year when nearly every insurance technology vendor is talking about AI, Vertafore's chief product officer, James Thom, is focused on a more specific question: "What happens when AI creates fragmentation instead of solving it?"

That distinction — between automation that accelerates a single task and automation that improves the flow of the entire business — is at the center of how Vertafore has positioned itself in 2026, and it goes a long way toward explaining why brokers rated its products at a perfect 5.0 across every criterion in this year's IB survey.

Thom credits it first to people. "Across our teams, we have an incredible depth of insurance expertise, people who understand the day-to-day realities of agencies, brokers, carriers, and MGAs because they have spent years working closely with them and, in many cases, working in the industry themselves," he says.

Technology alone cannot deliver it. Understanding the workflows, pressures, and opportunities customers face, and then building solutions that reflect that reality, is what does. Those relationships keep Vertafore focused on the problems that matter most rather than chasing innovation for its own sake.

Twelve months after implementation, the impact is measurable across multiple parts of the business. In employee benefits, AI-powered data ingestion can reduce processes that once took 45 minutes to just a few minutes. Agencies using AgencyOne are experiencing up to 40 percent faster time in finding information. In rating and quoting, better connectivity between agencies and carriers can cut personal lines quoting time in half.

For MGAs, Vertafore's AI-backed Portal Launcher Agent helps bring new programs to market faster while reducing the errors that come from manual data entry. The biggest operational problem brokers are bringing to Vertafore in 2026, Thom says, is how to achieve automation with AI without creating more fragmentation.

"The opportunity is to apply AI in a more connected way, reducing duplicate work, moving information between systems, surfacing insights at the right point in the workflow, and helping employees act faster with better context," Thom says.

When a claim comes in, the clock starts. For too long, what followed was a process defined by disconnection — re-keyed data, repeated conversations, siloed systems, and a policyholder caught in a start-stop experience that had little to do with how well they were covered.

Cotality, based in Irvine, CA, was built to change that. John Herr, vice president of technical sales, has spent more than two decades in the insurance industry watching the gap between what claims technology promised and what it delivered. Cotality's answer is an end-to-end claims platform that connects every step of the workflow, from first notice of loss (FNOL) through to final settlement.

The starting point is intelligent dispatching at the front end of the workflow, where complex algorithms factor in geographic nuances, traffic, loss type, and adjuster skill sets to identify the best available resource for each claim — and then continue optimizing that decision right up until deployment.

Guided damage assessment adds another layer. Cotality's Scope tool walks adjusters through a structured questionnaire covering roof type, age, and condition to automate the repair-versus-replace decision on exterior losses — one of the most consequential and experience-dependent judgments in the claims process.

"Regardless of who the person is, whether they're a 20-year adjuster or a two-year adjuster, you're going to get the same scalable, reliable, consistent output," Herr says.

The catastrophe landscape has sharpened the urgency of all of this. "The consistent theme over the last two to three years in the catastrophe space is that there is no consistent theme," Herr says. Carriers can no longer forecast storm types, frequency, or geography with any reliability.

For Canadian insurance brokers, the daily reality of navigating a fragmented technology landscape has long meant one thing: becoming a system specialist on top of being an insurance expert. Logging into a broker management system (BMS), then navigating out to an assortment of carrier portals and comparative raters, each with its own interface and logic, made for what Lisa Teggart, partner at 3Tree in Norval, ON, calls a "suboptimal workflow." The Unite Insurance Exchange Platform was built to end that.

Unite moves brokers back to where they want to be — inside their own BMS, with transactions starting and stopping in one place. The workflow is consistent regardless of the carrier, and in many cases, portal access is eliminated entirely.

The platform has been a decade in the making. In 2018, the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (IBAO) ran an industry initiative called BrokerFlow, which established an agreed model for broker-carrier connectivity. 3Tree stepped in, committed the funding, completed the initial build, and implemented it with foundational carriers. Unite is now entering a carrier expansion phase, with the Unite Community forecast to reach over 20 connected carriers by the end of the year.

ColumnZero, formerly the technology arm of High Street Underwriting Agency in Brisbane, Australia, has recently spun out as its own company under the 11th Avenue brand. Over 10 years of building, breaking, and rebuilding a proprietary portal from the ground up, the team has grown large enough to begin servicing additional agencies beyond the one it was originally built for.

Chief technology officer Andrew Martin describes that journey as "a labor of love," and the broker ratings bear him out — the platform scored among the highest of any recognized provider across ease of use, customer support, and streamlining of processes in this year's survey.

The decision to build and maintain a proprietary portal rather than buy off the shelf was not made lightly. "Having full control of a code base meant that we could replicate all of the binder requirements and edge cases and allow us to automate as much as we could," Martin says. Off-the-shelf offerings have improved since then, but "there's still nothing that really ticks every box for us."

Replacing a core system is one of the most consequential decisions a property and casualty insurer can make. The typical commitment runs 10–20 years; the organizational disruption is significant, and the stakes are high enough that even the most forward-thinking CIO will approach the process with a degree of anxiety.

Brodie McLellan, vice president of business development at Cognition+ in London, ON, has heard every version of that anxiety. "It is a big decision, and everybody gets nervous," he says. "If they weren't nervous, they wouldn't be doing their job." But he also tells those CIOs that the bigger risk is frequently doing nothing — legacy systems create growing challenges across operational efficiency, talent recruitment, cybersecurity, regulatory responsiveness, and customer expectations.

Cognition+ has navigated multiple market cycles, regulatory changes, evolving distribution models, and technology shifts across its 30-year history. "Innovation is important, but so is stability," McLellan says. The accumulated experience across Cognition+'s client base means the platform has approximately 900 years of insurance operations factored into it.