Originally published on Insurance News, October 26, 2026.
Artificial intelligence is mostly introduced in a hurry without the benefits of long-term planning and adequate assessment of core systems and legacy processes, Elysian founder and CEO Grace Hanson says.
Ms Hanson – who admits to having “always been a bit of a geek, interested in technology, how it functioned and its challenges” – says the insurance industry is experiencing “the calm before the AI storm”.
“It’s calm in the sense that we have this shiny new tool. It can do a lot of things more quickly than we previously could,” she told insuranceNEWS.com.au on the sidelines of the ITC conference in Las Vegas this month. “It can even let us code ourselves if we want to.
“But it's still working within the constructs of: how can it fit in with current technology and core technology?’ People don’t quite know what to do.”
She says the “rush to automate very quickly is a major reaction to what’s available and I do think there isn’t much strategic thinking. There’s a lot of ‘I can stick it here’, and there’s some value to that, but it’s just a short-term step.”
US-based Ms Hanson advises finding the right expert partner, and she lauds “respect for the creative spirit”, saying the winners will be those with the strongest sense of systems design.
“We’re finding our best engineers are ones with history degrees, humanities students who’ve read and understood language and can articulate strategy versus a very technical vision,” she said.
Elysian expects another decade of mostly human-determined decisions, but says the nature of employees may change.
“On the claim side, people who are so used to digging through a large amount of information now have to learn to trust the AI, but they also have to learn to manage it. It can’t be allowed to just do its own thing unless it’s appropriate.”
Ms Hanson says it is important that “people get over the idea” AI processing is of poorer quality.
“There’s still this reluctance we are seeing. A lot of our work has been educating the industry on how best to deploy this technology and what ‘good’ looks like. AI makes part of the process easy – it’s about finding how and where it works best.
“Technology that makes you more efficient doesn’t mean it’s less precise.”
