Federato, an InsurTech focused on underwriting intelligence, has launched an agentic AI platform designed to help insurers harness technology to assess, quote, and manage risk.

The new solution aims to eliminate inefficiencies and enable underwriters to move away from relying on outdated manual processes.

“For decades, the insurance industry has been held back by an old core of technologies, built on compromised legacy systems and siloed data,” said Federato CEO and Co-Founder Will Ross in a company press release. “What was once a solution is now a problem as these systems can’t meet the needs of the rapidly evolving industry.”

Federato’s technology uses the same logical framework as human underwriters but executes decisions at machine speed. Each quote also includes a detailed explanation of the AI’s reasoning.

“What I think Federato does really well is we’re pretty much one-of-one in the space in terms of companies that serve that full policy lifecycle the way the old core historically has, and that’s something that we hear from our customers they’re really looking for,” Ross said in an interview with Carrier Management at the 2025 InsurTech Connect conference in Las Vegas. “But also, those newer technologies, they’re very much built into what we do.”

Rather than focusing on a tech acquisition strategy, he said Federato works with its customers to find its own solutions to the problems they’re looking to solve and serve the full policy life cycle with technology from underwriting to billing and agency portals.

“You don’t expect any one customer to buy everything from us, but we do think customers really value that they could buy everything from us,” he said.

Alongside its AI launch, Federato introduced Control Tower, an upgraded platform offering real-time portfolio management for insurers. Developed in collaboration with dozens of property and casualty insurers, Control Tower provides governance, visibility, and strategy alignment across underwriting operations.

“It’s a transformative way of working,” said Federato Co-Founder and CTO William Steenbergen in the release. “AI analyzes large amounts of data at machine speed, while freeing expert underwriters to do what they do best: making nuanced decisions and building relationships.”

The launch of both agentic AI and Control Tower represents Federato’s broader mission to help insurers escape legacy technology constraints, according to the release.

“Typically, there’s some sort of techno-pessimism that seeps into a new technology, so people don’t understand if it’s really going to change anything,” Ross said. “We saw this in cloud, we saw this in mobile, we saw this in blockchain. What we’re hearing from executives is I’m not being served by my traditional kind of old work, so a huge part of what we’re focused on is meeting the market where they are.”

Ross said that one of the most important things with the adoption of new technology in insurance is the regulatory and compliance environment, which Federato is hoping to tackle with Control Tower.

“Control Tower is amazing because it takes a lot of what we focused on very early on, which is this idea of portfolio command and control for an insurer, good governance around what it is I’m writing and not writing, and combines that sense of control with the sense of control around AI models and AI agents and all these things that organizations are going to deploy into their environments to help with that risk selection and portfolio composition journey,” he said. “Helping our customers navigate that, and helping them do that in a way that’s secure, compliant, navigates a 50-state regulatory landscape, those are two of the most important things to me.”

He said he feels there’s an incumbency upon InsurTechs that understand both the technology and insurance landscape to be leaders when it comes to compliance.

“Whether we like it or not, insurers will put AI in place without thinking through the governance implications sometimes,” he said. “So it’s incumbent upon us to lead them to the water on that stuff.”

This is more important than ever, Ross said, as one of the biggest challenges for insurers right now is finding talent that can do both.

“I think one of the biggest challenges we’re seeing in insurance right now is dearth in talent, specifically talent that both understands the insurance industry and understands these technologies, specifically AI,” he said. “That’s a gap we’ve been able to fill for a lot of our customers.”

He said a big part of Federato’s strategy is forward deployed engineering, in which engineers on the company’s staff are onsite – sometimes virtually – working hand-in-hand with customers to help them understand the nuances of new technology.

“The advantage we have is we only focus on insurance, but we’re also able to attract a caliber of technology talent that sometimes our customers won’t be able to,” he said. “By attracting that type of talent and then making our company a training ground for these types of individuals, we’re able to go into these organizations and, with the breadth of our platform, really hear what is the problem they’re trying to solve and meet them where they want to go.”

Risks will always exist in insurance, but Ross said the biggest risk for insurers is falling behind.

“There have always been new risks, right? This is an extremely resilient industry,” he said. “Insurers are frightened of not finding that intersection of people and technology, and people who know both the technology and the industry. They’re afraid of falling behind. Having a trained pool of folks like that, that are working with that broader platform of technologies, helps them go wherever they want to go.”

Related: How Federato Solves Underwriters’ Problems – and Lowers Reinsurance Costs