How Insurers Get AI Into Production | Erie, Guidewire, Bevaya

How do insurers get AI out of the pilot and into production? Our customer, Erie Insurance, starts with a real business problem and builds a path to delivery before the experiment begins. This session was hosted by our partner Guidewire as part of its "Guidewire Marketplace Conversations" series. Guidewire CMO Brian Desmond talks with Keith Kennedy, who leads innovation at Erie Insurance, and our Co-Founder and CEO, Chaz Perera, about "The Practical Path to AI Value in Insurance." Keith explains how Erie avoids "innovation theater." The team uses a design-led approach, runs AI work through its AI Center of Excellence, and ties every experiment to its agile delivery process. That gives good ideas a clear route to production. He also shares Erie's three principles for build, buy, or partner decisions: use the right tool for the job, build only where it creates differentiation, and drive fast under control. The conversation then turns to the claims document ingestion work Erie runs with Bevaya, connected to Guidewire. Erie started with a couple of mail centers, then expanded to all mail centers and email. The rollout was phased on purpose to give people time to adjust. Both guests spend time on change management. Keith's view is that change is easier when people help build the solution. Chaz adds that AI change management has to bring in enterprise risk teams early, because models can drift over time. On partnerships, Keith names four things that matter: welcome the help, share a definition of success, share core beliefs, and execute well together. Chaz explains why the ROI case often dies after the pilot. Proofs of concept run in clean test settings, IT teams are stretched thin, and business users are allowed to fall back on the old way of working. Their closing advice: start with the end in mind, be intentional about experiments, and measure how frontline teams feel about the work, not just the dollars. Speakers Keith Kennedy, Innovation Leader, Erie Insurance Chaz Perera, Co-Founder and CEO, Bevaya Brian Desmond, Chief Marketing Officer, Guidewire Bevaya and Guidewire We are a Guidewire PartnerConnect member. Our Guidewire-validated Accelerator brings Bevaya AI Agents into ClaimCenter on Guidewire Cloud, and it is available on the Guidewire Marketplace. Bevaya connects through APIs and sits on top of your existing systems, so ClaimCenter stays your system of record. Find us on the Guidewire Marketplace: https://marketplace.guidewire.com/par... About Bevaya Bevaya builds AI Agents exclusively for insurance. Our agents work across underwriting, claims, and policy servicing, and they run on InsurGPT, our insurance-trained model. Bevaya is live in 120+ production deployments with 98%+ accuracy, and teams go live in 4 to 12 weeks. Chapters 0:00 Introductions: Guidewire, Erie Insurance, and Bevaya 1:26 Moving beyond AI experimentation 3:36 What insurers driving AI value do differently 5:05 Build, buy, or partner: Erie's three principles 6:01 AI claims document ingestion with Guidewire 8:09 Claims results and the adjuster experience 9:55 Change management for AI adoption 12:25 Why enterprise risk belongs in AI change management 13:39 How to make insurer and vendor partnerships work 15:22 Why AI ROI dies after the pilot 16:14 Advice for scaling AI from pilot to production 18:59 Measuring AI value beyond dollars 19:55 Closing Take the Bevaya platform tour: https://www.bevaya.ai/tour?utm_source... See how our Loss Run Model compares to frontier models: https://www.bevaya.ai/benchmarks?utm_... Watch more "Guidewire Marketplace Conversations": https://www.guidewire.com/resources/g... #InsuranceAI #Guidewire #AIAgents