Author: James W. Moore
A look at what’s actually landing in the platform you’re already running
This piece is a companion to The State of AI in Retail Insurance Agencies. That piece covers the point-solution tools agencies are adding on top of their existing systems. This piece covers what the platform itself, the system you’re already running, is building natively.
You didn’t choose your agency management system, or your policy management system if you’re on the carrier side, because of its AI roadmap. You chose it years ago, for reasons that had nothing to do with artificial intelligence: what your staff already knew, what your carriers connected to, what a migration would have cost you to leave behind. Switching now, even if a competitor’s AI story is flashier, is expensive and disruptive enough that most agencies and carriers simply won’t do it.
That makes a different question more useful than “which platform has the best AI.” The question that actually matters to you is: what is my vendor building into the system I’m already on, and when is it actually going to show up? This is a near-term look at six platforms, three carrier-side core systems and three agency-side systems, covering what’s live now, what’s still in early access or freshly announced, and where the AI itself is actually coming from.
Guidewire
Guidewire’s answer arrived in April with ProNavigator, an AI assistant now embedded directly in InsuranceSuite and InsuranceNow. It’s live, not a preview, and it gives underwriters, claims adjusters, billing specialists, and CSRs role-specific answers grounded in the insurer’s own documents, with citations and audit trails built in rather than bolted on. Worth knowing where it came from: Guidewire acquired ProNavigator outright in an October 2025 deal, a knowledge management platform already used by 34 insurance organizations, 12 of which were already Guidewire customers, so this wasn’t a from-scratch build but a proven tool folded into the core platform. A second, separate move followed a couple months after ProNavigator’s launch, when Guidewire welcomed engineers, data scientists, and federated machine learning technology from integrate.ai, a talent and technology transfer rather than a formal acquisition, to build out Guidewire Intel. That lets carriers train models on pooled industry data while keeping their own data private and localized. If you’re on Guidewire, ProNavigator is something you can ask your rep about today. A broader Agentic Framework for building custom AI agents is still early access, so treat anything beyond ProNavigator as coming, not here yet.
Duck Creek
Duck Creek’s move is the most architecturally ambitious of the group. In late April, they launched an insurance-native Agentic AI Platform built on a combination of carrier-trained models and what they call neuro-symbolic reasoning, essentially deterministic rules layered on top of probabilistic AI so the system stays governable. Two applications are live on top of it: an Agentic Underwriting Workbench that triages and enriches submissions in real time, and Agentic First Notice of Loss, which routes and validates claims across digital, voice, and mobile channels at intake. The FNOL piece is worth knowing where it came from: it was built with Google Cloud and runs on Gemini models, a clean example of a carrier-facing core system that’s transparent about using a frontier lab’s technology rather than claiming everything is homegrown. If you’re evaluating what’s real versus promised here, the Underwriting Workbench and FNOL are both live for early customers. A third piece, an AI-driven Product Configurator that converts underwriting manuals into rating configurations, is still services-assisted rather than something your team runs itself.
Applied Epic and EZLynx
Applied Systems, which owns both Epic and EZLynx, has shipped more named AI features than anyone else on this list, and a 2024 acquisition explains why. Applied bought Planck, an insurance-specific AI company, and it’s been the engine behind most of what followed. Applied Recon, live now, ingests carrier statements in any format and reconciles them against Epic automatically, cutting a task that used to eat hours of a finance team’s week down to a review-and-approve step. Applied Book Builder, announced in September 2024 and shipped in the first half of 2025, so it’s had real time in the field, enriches account data from public sources to surface cross-sell and coverage-gap opportunities. Personal Lines Renewal Insights compares current and renewal premiums without a manual pull. All three are natively built into Epic. One feature worth knowing the sourcing on: Epic AutoFill, which extracts data from carrier documents, runs on technology from a company called Cytora rather than being built in-house. A real agency example is worth more than an aggregate statistic here: Stockman Insurance, a 15-location agency, adopted Book Builder and Recon specifically to handle growth without proportional headcount, which is about as concrete a use case as this space has produced. EZLynx is closer behind than it might appear: it shares an Applied AI Lab with Epic, and its own AI assistant, EVA, has been live since January 2025 with email drafting and account summarization features already shipped, not just promised. The “AI teammate” language you’ll see in EZLynx marketing is aspirational, but the underlying features are further along than the branding suggests.
Vertafore AMS360
Vertafore’s public framing has stayed modest, “your human expertise, amplified” is still their tagline, but what they’ve actually built caught up fast. In April, they launched the Velocity AI Platform at their Accelerate conference, with six named AI agents: Reconciliation, Email, Submission Processing, Benefit Plan, Portal Launcher, and an Insurance Expert Agent living inside ReferenceConnect AI that answers coverage questions with cited, explainable responses. ReferenceConnect AI itself is worth knowing the scale of: it’s live now, drawing on more than 75 industry publishers and over a million verified documents across 60 commercial lines, not a small pilot feature. The Reconciliation Agent alone is a meaningful jump from where AMS360’s AI story used to sit, Vertafore cites 90% time saved and 94% accuracy against 200-plus carriers on that feature specifically. Worth knowing: Vertafore has built this deliberately model-agnostic, meaning they can route different tasks to different underlying AI providers rather than committing to one, which matters if you care about how fast the platform can adapt as the underlying technology changes. Third-party integrations, FurtherAI, Sonant, and others, still sit alongside the native build rather than having been fully replaced by it. If you’re on AMS360, this is a bigger near-term shift than the platform’s own understated marketing suggests.
Zywave
Zywave has gone further than anyone here on naming its AI agents specifically, and it’s backed by an outside signal worth taking seriously: Forrester named Zywave a Leader in its Q4 2025 Wave for Insurance Agency Management Systems, scoring them highest of any vendor evaluated on vision, innovation, and roadmap. Four AI agents, Prospect Identification, Lead Sourcing & Scoring, Research & Enrichment, and Outreach & Optimization, rolled out to more than 35 early-adopter organizations in February and are moving toward general availability through the rest of 2026. Zywave’s own framing is that these agents replace workflows that used to consume 45% of a producer’s time on prospecting alone. That’s a vendor-sourced figure, worth treating as a claim to verify against your own team’s experience rather than a settled fact. More agents focused on quoting automation and coverage benchmarking are planned later this year. If you’re on Zywave’s AMS, the near-term additions are concentrated on the sales and prospecting side of the business first, not service or accounting.
HawkSoft
HawkSoft is the clearest exception to everything above, and it’s worth understanding why rather than treating it as falling behind. HawkSoft is privately owned, has said clearly it has no interest in being acquired, and has built its entire AI strategy through partnerships rather than a single internal platform: Exdion for policy checking and quote comparison, Sonant for voice AI and call handling, Gaya for automating data entry into carrier portals, and Liberate for broader voice-based automation. If you’re on HawkSoft, “what’s coming” doesn’t mean a quarterly platform release the way it does for the other five vendors here. It means checking which new partner gets added next. That’s a genuinely different philosophy, a curated marketplace instead of a unified roadmap, and it comes with a different tradeoff: you get to pick and choose which AI capability you turn on, but there’s no single vendor accountable for how well those pieces work together.
The pattern underneath all six
Look past the branding differences and the near-term shape is similar across every platform here: less manual data entry, faster submission and renewal handling, and AI drafting the first pass of routine communications so a person reviews rather than writes from scratch. That’s the common shape of what’s landing across the industry right now, regardless of which system you’re on.
What to actually do with this
Don’t assume “coming in 2026” means available to your contract in 2026. Cloud-hosted and recently upgraded accounts tend to get new AI features first, and none of these vendors have been fully transparent about whether older or on-premises versions get the same rollout on the same timeline. The one honest move here is direct: check your renewal or upgrade cycle, then ask your rep specifically which of these features are live on your version today, not on the version in the press release.
Sources:
- Guidewire Launches ProNavigator
- Guidewire Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire ProNavigator
- Guidewire + integrate.ai
- Duck Creek Launches Insurance-Native Agentic AI Platform
- Applied Systems AI Advancements
- Applied Recon
- Applied Closed 2024, Planck Acquisition
- Stockman Insurance Case Study
- EZLynx AI Features, EVA
- Vertafore Introduces Velocity AI Platform
- Vertafore Launches ReferenceConnect AI
- Vertafore AMS360
- Zywave Named a Leader in Insurance Agency Management Systems
- Zywave Winter 2026 Release
- HawkSoft Partners
AI Disclaimer: This content was created with assistance from artificial intelligence technology. While content is based on factual information from the source material, readers should verify all details directly with the respective sources before making business decisions.
