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Hey friends, before we begin, I wanted to acknowledge our absence over the past few editions and thank you for your patience. I stepped away after the passing of my father to spend time with my family during this difficult time. The past week has been a quiet reminder that work will always be there, but time with the people we love is finite. If there's one thing I hope you take away beyond today's edition, it's to keep your loved ones close and never take those moments for granted. Thank you for your patience, and for being here. I'm grateful to be back.
Most people think insurance companies sell policies.
They do, but that is not really the business they are in.
Insurance is, at its core, a decision business. Every policy, premium, claim, and renewal begins with one question: What is the likelihood of something happening, and what should we do about it? Everything else exists to support that decision.
For decades, insurers have answered those questions through separate functions. Underwriters assess risk before a policy is written. Claims teams investigate what happened after a loss. Fraud specialists look for suspicious activity. Actuaries study the outcomes and refine pricing for the future.
Each team sees one part of the picture. AI is beginning to connect them.
Instead of making decisions at isolated moments, insurers are starting to build systems that learn continuously. Connected vehicles generate real-time driving data. Computer vision assesses damage from photographs. Language models understand policy documents, inspection reports, and medical records in seconds. Every interaction becomes another signal that helps improve the next decision.
That changes the economics of the industry.
The biggest opportunity is not simply processing claims faster or helping underwriters review more documents. It is building a continuous intelligence system where underwriting, pricing, claims, fraud detection, and risk management all learn from one another.
Insurance has always been about managing uncertainty. AI is changing how uncertainty gets managed.
And that may become one of the biggest competitive shifts the industry has seen in decades.
In today's edition, we'll explore:
Why insurance is fundamentally a prediction business, not simply a policy business
Why AI is shifting insurers from periodic assessments to continuous risk intelligence
The Insurance Intelligence Loop and how connected workflows create compounding advantages
Where AI is creating the greatest economic value across underwriting, pricing, claims, and fraud detection
What current market data tells us about adoption, investment, and the industry's biggest challenges
Where founders have the strongest opportunity to build infrastructure companies
Which businesses are likely to win, and which operating models may struggle
What this transformation means for the future of insurance work
— Naseema Perveen
THE CONTROL LAYER BY VICTOR DEY
The Control Layer is Victor’s new premium column for people who actually have to make decisions about AI and frontier technology, not just read the headlines. Each piece focuses on what is being said behind closed doors: the trade-offs, the pressure points, and the conversations that never make it into press releases.
Every edition will come back to a single question: who is really in control here – and what happens if they’re wrong? If you work in AI, risk, policy, or strategy, this is the stream you follow to stay three years ahead instead of three years behind.
You can read Victor’s message on what to expect and more details about his new column here.
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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VIKTOR
Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.
Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.
