“Manual data entry is a huge problem. All the data people wish they could have is sitting in some insurance document”

Anupam Gupta, Applied

“When you speak to a commercial line’s underwriter, they say 40 percent of their time is spent reading and interpreting data. Talking about it, it sounds quite comical. The reality is that we’re here to solve this”

Graham Blackwell, Applied Systems

“It takes someone seven years to become a doctor because [they] have to learn so much about the body – how it functions, how it works. That’s a good analogy for insurance”

Richard Hartley, Cytora

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AI is revolutionizing insurance from quote to claim

Applied’s agency management technology replaces operational friction with intelligent workflows

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Graham Blackwell

Applied Systems

Anupam Gupta

Applied Systems

Richard Hartley

Cytora

Industry experts

Insurance is built on the promise of protecting against future risk, yet too much of the industry still runs on archaic systems. Data from Clearwater Analytics found that 74 percent of insurance companies rely on legacy technology to complete core functions, with 70 percent of their annual IT budget being used to maintain this outdated tech. For those that do use AI, an overreliance on non-industry specific platforms leaves critical workflows like policy issuance, quoting, and remarketing far from optimized – and it shows. In a recent roundtable with Insurance Business, Graham Blackwell, president of Applied Systems; Anupam Gupta, Applied’s chief product officer; and Richard Hartley, CEO and co-founder of Cytora – recently acquired by Applied Systems – came together to discuss how AI, or more specifically vertical AI, can be leveraged to solve operational challenges and make agents increasingly productive and efficient.

Applied Systems is the leading global provider of cloud-based software that powers the business of insurance. Recognized as a pioneer in insurance automation and the innovation leader, Applied is the world’s largest provider of broker management systems and product distribution solutions, serving brokers, insurers, and MGAs throughout the US, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, and the UK. By automating the insurance life cycle, Applied’s people and products enable millions of people around the world to safeguard and protect what matters most.

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Graham Blackwell, president, has responsibility for Applied's strategic growth business units, including Ivans, EZLynx, and Applied Pay. Graham joined Applied in 2020 from SMS Assist, where he led the company’s sales, marketing, and strategy functions as chief revenue officer. Prior to SMS Assist, Graham spent almost eight years with Bain Capital’s private equity operating team where he worked closely with the boards and management teams of Bain Capital’s portfolio companies. Before that, Graham was an associate partner with McKinsey & Company and a consultant with Accenture. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and BBA degree from Ohio University.

Applied Systems

Graham Blackwell

Anupam Gupta, chief product officer, is responsible for the company’s product vision and product management teams. He was formerly CPO at 4C Insights, a sophisticated data & analytics SaaS provider to the AdTech/MarTech industries, which was acquired by Mediaocean, the mission-critical platform for omnichannel advertising with more than $200 billion in annualized media spend managed through its software, connecting the ecosystem of agencies, brands, media, technology, and data. As CPO of the combined companies, he spearheaded their product transformation to the cloud, adding new products fueled by data and intelligence infused in the core workflow. Previously, he’s led product organizations for several tech companies, including at Vubiquity, Mixpo, and Microsoft, among others.

Applied Systems

Anupam Gupta

Richard Hartley is CEO and co-founder of Cytora, one of the world’s leading digital risk processing platforms. Founded in 2013, Cytora has been at the forefront of the digitalization of the insurance industry, winning multiple awards and launching one of the first uses of agentic AI in insurance. In 2025, Cytora was acquired by Applied Systems. Prior to founding Cytora, Richard worked in eBaoTech International in product management. He graduated from the University of Manchester in 2010 and completed his master’s in political science at UCL in 2011.

Cytora

Richard Hartley

In Partnership with

Fighting for the customer

The customer owned a bank saw a huge boost after the Hayne Royal Commission. One year on and their market share is growing as customer continue to see their value.

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Stewart Saunders

Heritage Bank

Darren McLeod

Beyond Bank

Fernando Lemos

Bank Australia

Industry experts

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Bank Australia

Fernando Lemos

Beyond Bank

Darren McLeod

Heritage Bank

Stewart Saunders

In Partnership with

Fighting for the customer

The customer owned a bank saw a huge boost after the Hayne Royal Commission. One year on and their market share is growing as customer continue to see their value.

Read on

Stewart Saunders

Heritage Bank

Darren McLeod

Beyond Bank

Fernando Lemos

Bank Australia

Industry experts

Beyond Bank

Darren McLeod

Heritage Bank

Stewart Saunders

Bank Australia

Fernando Lemos

Published Dec 1, 2025

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Today, an agent might receive basic policy details over the phone or by email. That information is then keyed manually into an agency management system (AMS). From there, the submission must be prepared for an underwriter – who, again, often re-enters that same data into a separate system. The process is slow, error-prone, and deeply inefficient. “There’s huge opportunity to say, how do we digitize all that?” Blackwell told IB. “How do you extract data from a client email that you can then turn into an underwriting form? How do I take the phone call that I’m having and turn that into data that shows up automatically through AI into my management system?” For Applied, the answer starts with integrating artificial intelligence directly into its platform, enabling its management system to read, interpret, and act on unstructured information.

“In a perfect world, there’s no typing at all,” Blackwell added. “You can take policy information and use AI to upload it into our system – then we’re going to extract the information that’s necessary. We’ll then send that over to the carrier’s underwriting system.” But the real transformation lies in what happens next. If any information is missing during this process, Applied’s platform sends a message back to the account manager in real time. If it’s approved, it goes straight back to the agency for review. While the promise of automation in insurance isn’t new, what Applied is building goes beyond faster data entry – it’s about restructuring how insurers and brokers collaborate using something Blackwell calls the “digital round trip.”

“Our management systems, with Epic and EZLynx, should facilitate every workflow an agency performs every day,” added Blackwell. “Whether that’s figuring out who you want to prospect or who you need to renew and remarket, or creating a submission. And then, once the policy is bound, we need to capture all that information.” The second step is about helping agencies and carriers complete those workflows together, without duplicative effort. “Whether it’s reconciling money movement or submissions…

assets like Cytora help us facilitate those workflows in a more collaborative way,” added Blackwell. The third step revolves around layering AI across all these processes to limit manual work. That layering is Gupta’s job. For Gupta, the key to success here is a perfect blend of smart AI with practical and embedded intelligence that solves very specific pain points. This begins with one simple question – where’s the time really being wasted? “AI is not just another technology or tool – it’s an enabler for lots of good things,” Gupta told IB. “If we go through the [insurance] life cycle, we’ll [see] there’s manual work AI can speed up.” Blackwell added: “When you speak to a commercial line’s underwriter, they say 40 percent of their time is spent reading and interpreting data. Talking about it, it sounds quite comical. The reality is that we’re here to solve this.” At Applied, Gupta and his team do a lot of research and speak to customers to better understand their workflows, uncover their pain points, and reveal how technology can help ease some of their pressures. “Manual data entry is a huge problem,” said Gupta. “All the data people wish they could have is sitting in some insurance document. [It’s about looking at] how AI can extract from a given document the right data set that is needed, fill that in the right places with accuracy, with human [oversight], and save hours in the process.”

Outdated systems holding firms back For many firms, traditional systems still hinge on manual data entry – wasting valuable time and opening the door to costly mistakes. Applied Systems is on a mission to change that. With its recent acquisition of AI startup Cytora, Applied is aiming to rewire the entire insurance value chain – from quote to claim – into an efficient, digital round trip. “The biggest thing agencies do is write business, renew business, and counsel their customers,” Blackwell explained. “All of that requires working with their carrier partners effectively. And there’s tons of opportunity to improve that process for them.”

The power of vertical AIWhile artificial intelligence can give agents time back, not all AI is created equal. Vertical AI refers to specialized artificial intelligence systems designed and trained specifically for a particular industry – in this case, insurance. Unlike horizontal AI tools, which offer broad, general-purpose capabilities, vertical AI is tailored to specific market segments. While horizontal solutions can provide some useful benefits, they often fall short when applied to insurance. “You might get 60 or 70 percent of the answers right,” Gupta explained. “But agents are expert advisors. I don’t think 60–70 percent is good enough; that’s where you need to deal with the nuances of insurance. [While] Gemini or ChatGPT can parse and give you some information, they don’t look at all those legal clauses, and they don’t look at what’s covered or excluded. You can’t reason with all that; you’re giving inaccurate information – and that’s not good enough for an agent.” That’s why Applied is committed to developing vertical AI solutions that are trained on deep industry-specific data and regulations to tackle the unique challenges of the insurance sector.

“Say a client is wondering, ‘Am I covered or not?’” prefaced Gupta. “You have your original policy document; you might have had some changes during the term of the policy or bought a new car – all those changes [come] together, and now you have to look at lots of different documents. You need to reason with that – you need to understand what’s included and what’s not included. And horizontal AI solutions simply won’t go deep enough here.” Another sphere that vertical AI can be used to improve is accounting and financial management. Firms have to grapple with precise commission payouts as well as collecting client payments – the accuracy of which is essential to balancing books.

“When you’re looking at hundreds of different carrier statements with thousands of variations, you’re reconciling down to the cent – and incredible accuracy is needed,” added Gupta. But as impressive as vertical AI is, it must also be seamless to navigate. As Gupta explained, if you make people swivel to another screen, adoption inevitably drops. However, if you surface the intelligence right where they’re working, and it makes their lives easier, they won’t even notice it’s AI they’re using. From 40 minutes to less than 60 seconds Within weeks of acquisition, Cytora was already integrated into Applied’s Epic platform. The first use case:

autofill. Cytora processes employee benefits documents and pre-fills plan details that previously took 30 to 40 minutes. Now? The whole process takes less than a minute. As co-founder and CEO of Cytora, Hartley has spent the last decade building intelligent systems for commercial underwriting. Since joining Applied, he’s now focused on scaling those capabilities across brokers, insurers, and reinsurers. Hartley compares his entry into insurance to the path of becoming a doctor, where success hinges on deep knowledge, critical thinking, and effective crisis management.

“It takes someone seven years to become a doctor because [they] have to learn so much about the body – how it functions, how it works,” Hartley told IB. “That’s a good analogy for insurance. When the patient comes in to the doctor, they haven’t spent seven years learning about medicine – so they’re describing their pain in a very authentic way. [From there], the doctor has to understand and assimilate what they’re hearing to their view of what’s actually going on and how to solve it. The insurance industry is a bit like that – there’s a lot of expertise required.” As Hartley explained, the client who’s seeking insurance and the way they describe their risk information is very different from what the insurer needs to underwrite that risk. That’s where vertical AI comes in. Cytora’s platform reads incoming documents – whether that’s policies, claims, or spreadsheets – and transforms them into structured, easily digestible data.

‘Protect their businesses, protect their homes, and protect themselves’Looking ahead, Blackwell emphasized that for agents aiming not just to survive but to thrive in the year ahead, Applied and Cytora are committed partners – ready to help drive success now and for the long run. “When we first met Hartley and spoke about Cytora, he really wanted it to be flexible. He wanted it to help people manage workflows in the way that made sense for them. I think we’ve really embraced that idea – Applied really wants to be the fabric of the most important workflows for insurance. “We want to help take away all that manual work and all that time that’s pulling you away from counseling your customers, from helping them protect their businesses, protect their homes, and protect themselves.”

“It’s a very satisfying experience for someone to use,” added Hartley. “We provide our platform in a self-service way to our customers so they can put their own flair into it [too].”

of the top agencies on the Business Insurance Top 100 list use Applied Epic of Reagan Consulting Best Practices agencies rely on Applied of Applied Epic reviewers on G2 rate it 4 stars or higher

7 out of 10

60%

91%

Source: Business Insurance

Source: Reagan Consulting

Source: G2 Reviews

Why Applied?

Succeeding in the next generation requires a connected, intelligent ecosystem of workflows across all lines of business and core agency functions. It requires a technology specialist’s focus that has deep experience in the insurance vertical, an integrated approach to software development, the largest network of insurer connectivity, and a unique insurance data set to deliver vertical-specific data insights and AI solutions that ensure agencies focus their time where it matters most. So, what makes us different and ready to be THE leader in insurance AI?

Source: Applied

Applied is uniquely positioned to solve the industry’s most pressing challenges

Deep domain expertise gives us a specialist’s edge

Integrated suite of solutions that cover the end-to-end policy life cycle

Largest carrier network gets us closest to distribution challenges – on both ends of the channel

Unmatched insurance data differentiates our AI-enabled vertical solutions from horizontal offerings

Source: Applied

Applied is uniquely positioned to solve the industry’s most pressing challenges

Deep domain expertise gives us a specialist’s edge

Our integrated suite of solutions covers the end-to-end policy life cycle

Applied’s large carrier network gets us closest to distribution challenges – on both ends of the channel

Unmatched insurance data differentiates our AI-enabled vertical solutions from horizontal offerings