For decades, the industry has taken a patchwork approach to managing tech debt, with a quilt of acronyms and phrases that were intended to fix everything – ESBs, RPA, containerization, “lift-and-shift,” refactor, rewrite, reimagine. The list goes on.

But often, the approach was to pay it down a little each year and defer the hard parts until the next budget cycle. That reflex made sense when the alternative was a multi-year, nine-figure replacement with an uncertain payoff. It no longer does. The carriers setting the pace have stopped treating legacy as a debt to be serviced and started treating AI as the way to change how the business operates across underwriting, claims, and policy administration.