Can AI work at an insurance brokerage? In this Peer to Pier interview, Heffernan Insurance Brokers' Kate Grasman explains what innovation means inside an insurance brokerage and how AI can actually help make huge savings.
00:03 - [music]
00:03 - Paul Lucas: Hello everybody, welcome to Insurance Business TV. We are here at Insurance Fest 2026 for another peer-to-peer interview and now I am meeting Kate Grasman. She is the CIO of Heffernan. Kate, welcome to Insurance Business TV.
00:32 - Kate Grasman: Thank you so much for having me.
00:34 - Paul Lucas: So Kate, let's talk about innovation if you don't mind. What does it mean inside a large carrier indeed a large brokerage right now compared to perhaps what the public perception of innovation is?
00:46 - Kate Grasman: Yeah, I mean I think for me as the chief information officer, innovation is super important to me and it's also important to my entire executive team. So innovation means to me is looking at new ways of doing business. It also means implementing new technologies and it's really just being imagining the art of the possible. Right? So for me innovation is probably 50% of my job and 50% of my team's job and then we've been able to partner with a number of our business partners in order to bring innovation to life because if it's only an idea, if you don't execute it, doesn't matter.
01:21 - Paul Lucas: Well, on that theme, if you don't mind, have there been any innovations, any transformations that you've pushed for but perhaps you know, have faced some resistance internally?
01:28 - Kate Grasman: Of course. Anyone who is in part of transformation, you will always find some resistance. But we've actually been pretty fortunate. Two years ago we embarked on a journey to do some of the simple things that you hear about now. Proposal generation, policy check, policy comparison. We started that journey with AI two years ago and you know, it didn't it didn't pick up immediately because some of the tool wasn't quite ready yet. AI wasn't quite ready but we've actually trained the AI and we use Fulcrum right now. We've trained the AI so well now everyone's doing endorsements, policy checks. We're now getting ready to deploy certificates of insurance.
02:00 - Paul Lucas: Right.
02:02 - Kate Grasman: And I would say today we've saved $600,000 just on that particular platform that we innovated on. The team adopted it and it's just been an amazing success. But what's been most important about this is it's really improved our account managers the AI fluency. They're interested in it now. They're not asking me for hey, can I get Claude, you know, which was different than even a year ago. But it's just like once you find a business problem that you're solving in a new way and a couple people adopt it, they start talking about it, then you have more people adopted it. Now I have the managers saying you must use this tool because it's so effective.
02:44 - Paul Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. And it's amazing when you see a return on investment like that as well.
02:49 - Kate Grasman: 100% and that was an easy one to find the ROI. We've had other innovations. Right now we've built a carrier database with Stitch Studio where we're able to match customers with placing carriers so that we match them faster. So we have this database of who's the best that can do this for our customers. So it's really a client facing. The ROI isn't as clear, but we've gotten great traction with our producers and account managers with that technology as well. So we're all into technology and like I said, I'd say it's more than 50% of my time.
03:26 - Paul Lucas: Well, speaking of matching, how are you seeing those digital assets as fintech assets? How are they sort of, you know, combining with traditional insurance products now?
03:36 - Kate Grasman: So, you know, if you think about traditional insurance products, um you know, you have your standard AMSs, right? Your account management systems. And you know, we're really embedding the technology around, you know, those preexisting systems that work very well for us. Um you know, we're really opportunistic about what business problems we're trying to solve. So for instance, we have, you know, we're using our AMS and we are right now using Gaia for a super copy and paste for different applications. We're also using like an Anson type tool to do submission ingestion, get the questions ready, and then submit for bind. So, we're really we have a digital, you know, we have digital capability to read emails, do all the work, but then have a human in the loop, like one of our producers, actually keep that relationship, but make it easier, you know, make it operationally easier for them. So, we, you know, clearly are doing a ton in this space, but we're really building on top of the base foundation that we have. But, what's key in this is you have to get your data right. Because the data actually drives your reporting and then also drives your drives your AI. So, making sure that everything you had before that you're building and surrounding, it's kind of like a volleyball with Velcro. You take the pieces, you have the your basic foundation, you just keep adding things on and changing it as the technology changes.
04:55 - Paul Lucas: Okay, interesting. And then and I guess as well, you know, in terms of innovating and moving forward, there must be some legacy systems or legacy process that is are still hanging over you that you'd love to just eliminate. If we could get rid of one of them now, what would it be?
05:14 - Kate Grasman: Oh, I don't want to really talk about that.
05:16 - Paul Lucas: Okay.
05:17 - Kate Grasman: But, I mean, I can say I can say some things I'd like to get rid of. I think if I were to change one thing, it would really work on how do we build between the brokers and the carriers an API layer of data exchange so that we could work faster and better for our clients.
05:37 - Paul Lucas: Yep.
05:39 - Kate Grasman: So, if there's one thing I'd want to change, there's a lot of manual work around insurance, and I think if we were to change that, that would be good. In consumer products, when I worked there, we had something called G10 where we standardized across 144 attributes. If we could do the same thing with our carriers, I think life would be better.
