At Acrisure, technology transformation is not treated as a parallel experiment but as a direct intervention into the company’s operating core. Ben Funk (pictured), chief technology and AI officer, positioned the firm’s strategy as a deliberate departure from traditional innovation models. Rather than building isolated labs or pilot programs, Acrisure embedded engineering directly into live workflows, It's more than insurance, this is something happening across their entire business, which also includes payments, cyber security, real estate and mortgage.
That approach reflects a broader shift in the industry, where incremental digitization is no longer sufficient to drive competitive advantage. For Funk, the objective was not efficiency gains alone, but a redesign of operational logic itself. “Easy never fundamentally changes how a business operates,” he said, framing the company’s strategy as a move toward what he called “hard mode” innovation.
Acrisure’s transformation focused on reengineering core processes, from client engagement through to placement, servicing, and renewals. Rather than layering technology onto legacy systems, the company is rebuilding workflows from the ground up, embedding technical teams alongside business operators. This “forward deployed engineering” model ensured that development was informed by real-time operational friction rather than theoretical use cases.
“We build in situ, from the experiential pain of real workflows,” Funk said. He emphasized that technical and business teams shared ownership of outcomes, eliminating the disconnect that often undermines enterprise transformation efforts. Each function was challenged to rethink its daily operations without constraint, supported by engineering resources applied at the point of impact.
One example is Project LeftSeat, developed within Acrisure Aerospace. Instead of digitizing a manual quoting process, the company rebuilt it entirely. The system captures communications, enriches them with external data, and orchestrates interactions across multiple carriers simultaneously. The result is a quoting process reduced from days to minutes, with improvements in consistency and scalability.
“These aren’t experiments,” Funk said. “They’re inch-wide, mile-deep reinventions of how work gets done.” The emphasis on depth over breadth reflects a belief that sustainable advantage comes from fully rearchitected processes rather than incremental enhancements.
To support this transformation, Acrisure partnered with a range of major technology providers, including AI and cloud platforms, as well as emerging startups. However, Funk stressed that these relationships extended beyond conventional vendor arrangements. Instead, partners were integrated into the same forward-deployed model, contributing directly to operational use cases.
“We’re not just procuring their technology as vendors,” he said. “We’re engaging them deeply as part of our forward-deployed engineering model.” This approach allowed Acrisure to combine external innovation with internal domain expertise, accelerating development while maintaining alignment with business objectives.
The company also expanded partnerships within the insurance ecosystem, particularly with carrier partners and distribution channels. These integrations were designed to streamline cross-organizational workflows, reducing friction in placement and servicing while enabling new growth opportunities.
Funk described partnership as a mechanism for scaling innovation across the industry, not just within Acrisure itself. By embedding technology into real-world processes and validating it against production demands, the company aimed to raise expectations for what operational transformation could deliver.
Funk framed the current phase of transformation within a broader evolution of artificial intelligence. He described 2025 as “the year of the AI agent,” when organizations began recognizing that AI could perform meaningful work rather than simply generate content. By contrast, 2026 is emerging as the era of orchestration, where the challenge shifts from deploying individual agents to coordinating them across complex workflows.
“The competitive advantage is now the layer above them,” he said. This orchestration layer must connect systems, manage state, and sequence tasks across environments such as CRM platforms, policy administration systems, and communication channels.
Despite rapid advances in tooling, Funk argued that the primary challenge is not technical integration. Instead, it lies in capturing and operationalizing the tacit expertise of experienced professionals. “How do we extract, structure, and operationalize that judgment into auditable workflows,” he said, highlighting the need to translate human decision-making into repeatable systems.
This shift introduces new complexities, particularly in regulated environments. Orchestration requires robust governance, including traceability, role-based access, and auditability. At the same time, adoption depends on aligning technology with human workflows. “If AI adds friction or threatens identity, adoption dies,” Funk said.
To address these challenges, Acrisure embedded its engineering teams with frontline experts, mapping how work is actually performed and encoding those insights into agent-driven processes. The company also prioritized orchestration over isolated automation, ensuring that systems could coordinate actions across multiple platforms. Governance was integrated from the outset, with controls designed to build trust in AI-driven decisions.
Measurement focused on business outcomes rather than technological activity. Metrics such as cycle time, quote quality, and conversion rates were used to assess impact, reinforcing the emphasis on operational change rather than experimentation. “The challenge isn’t deploying AI,” Funk said. “It’s reshaping the operating model so human judgment becomes higher leverage.”
