Guidewire Connections 2025, held in late October, gathered over 3,500 P&C professionals and officially launched the era of Intelligent Insurance. This theme marks a strategic shift from foundational modernisation to leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to redefine operations, risk management, and customer experience.
For insurance professionals in the Nordic region—a market known for high digital maturity and demanding customers—the conference provided a practical blueprint for maintaining a competitive edge through technology adoption.
Defining the Pillars of Intelligent Insurance
Guidewire’s CEO, Mike Rosenbaum, affirmed the company's focus on providing a trusted platform, now driven by AI. The conference unveiled four strategic advancements designed to embed intelligence directly into the P&C value chain:
1. PricingCenter: Speed and Precision in Pricing
P&C insurers face persistent technical inflation and heightened volatility from climate and cyber risks. Traditional annual or semiannual pricing cycles are no longer sufficient to track the rapid evolution of risk and cost structures accurately.
PricingCenter addresses this by unifying actuarial modelling and the rating engine. It allows actuaries and business teams to integrate internal and external data into advanced predictive models rapidly. The critical benefit is agility: the ability to design, test, and deploy new tariff models in hours, a necessity for maintaining profitability in today’s volatile market.
2. GenAI Services: Secure, Embedded AI Agents
GenAI Services addresses the widespread challenge of deploying AI effectively and at scale. This framework securely embeds AI agents directly into core processes (underwriting, policy, claims) via the Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP).
Crucially, Agent Studio allows insurers to tailor, test, and manage their own specific AI agents. An essential architectural feature is the abstraction layer, which protects mission-critical systems from the rapid changes in underlying Large Language Models (LLMs). GenAI Services transforms AI into a scalable performance engine, enabling teams to analyse and act faster across the insurance lifecycle.
3. UnderwritingCenter: Intelligent Commercial Risk Selection
Commercial lines often suffer from slow, manual underwriting, leading to long quote times that cede market share. UnderwritingCenter, the first application built on the GenAI Services framework, is an intelligent submission platform.
Its UnderwritingAssistant automates data collection and enrichment, accelerating submission triage and highlighting high-potential business. By integrating speed and precision into risk selection, the platform enables faster decisions, improves profitability, and enhances brokers' experience.
4. The ProNavigator Acquisition: Unified Knowledge Access
Guidewire announced the acquisition of ProNavigator, an AI-powered knowledge management platform. It addresses the critical operational issue of fragmented information, which slows service teams and agents, especially during high-volume events.
Integrated into core systems, ProNavigator gives staff instant, contextual, and reliable answers without leaving their workflow. This ensures consistency and accuracy across the entire workforce, which is vital for quality customer service and efficient scaling after a significant event.
Nordic Cloud Transformation: Award-Winning Discipline
The Nordic region's commitment to efficiency and high digital standards makes its cloud transformation case studies particularly relevant. These insurers prioritise structure and pragmatism in large-scale IT projects.
Two Finnish insurers, in particular, offered powerful insights at Connections 2025:
OP Life (Finland): Repurposing the Core and Winning an Award
OP Life, operating within Finland’s largest financial group, sought to replace an ageing, fragmented IT landscape that hampered growth. Their transformation was guided by strict principles: avoiding process replication, staying close to the Guidewire standard, and progressing via disciplined MVP cycles.
This approach successfully led to OP Life being in production on PolicyCenter and BillingCenter, utilising the Jutro digital platform, and implementing ClaimsCenter. The effort was recognised globally, as OP Life was a recipient of the Guidewire Innovation Award for their cloud transformation success. This award underscores the effectiveness of a disciplined approach in achieving a unified, scalable platform ready for advanced product development and continuous updates.
LocalTapiola (Finland): Modernising Under Organisational Constraint
LocalTapiola faced an acute challenge: an impending end-of-life deadline for their legacy systems combined with the organisational complexity of an autonomous regional mutual structure. They adopted a pragmatic, phased strategy to manage the transition without operational disruption.
They opted to migrate commercial lines directly to Guidewire Cloud first, while private lines continue on their existing core before a subsequent, planned cloud transfer. This approach respects the technical constraints while accelerating the standardisation of commercial operations. Their transformation, though complex, is setting the stage for deep modernisation, reduced legacy dependence, and extended automation in areas like claims and customer service.
Strategic Implications for Nordic Insurers
The Nordic case studies, coupled with the event's announcements, highlight three key imperatives for the region:
- Standardisation is the Strategic Advantage: The success of OP Life and LocalTapiola confirms that sticking close to the cloud-native standard is essential. This discipline minimises technical debt and maximises the ability to adopt the frequent, continuous updates required to leverage future AI capabilities.
- AI Adoption Must Be Governed: Given the Nordic region's high digital trust and strict EU regulations (including the forthcoming AI Act), the secure, reliable framework of GenAI Services is paramount. Insurers must be able to deploy AI rapidly without compromising compliance or system stability.
- Efficiency Drives Experience: While automation is critical for mitigating high operational costs, the modernised platform ultimately enables a superior customer experience. Unified data and intelligent tools facilitate consistency, high-quality interactions, and faster time-to-market for new products, which are vital for customer retention in competitive markets.
The modernisation of the core system is no longer merely an option; it is the fundamental condition for seizing the competitive advantage offered by the era of Intelligent Insurance.