Demo Days: Where Vision Turned into Action
This post highlights work I was proud to be part of at American Family Insurance. Details of the Demo Days initiative were made public with executive approval in November 2021. At the time, it represented a novel approach within the insurance industry and has since been featured in Digital Insurance Magazine and at conferences including Connected Claims USA and Future of Insurance USA.
A VISION FOR INTENTIONAL GROWTH
In 2019, I led the creation of a shared vision for the future of claims at American Family Insurance. As a futurist and design strategist with deep experience in regulated industries, reimagining how a 90-year-old mutual insurer could stay relevant and resilient in a changing world was exactly the kind of challenge I was built for.
A vision is nothing more than a concept pitch: design the concept — the way you'll create the change you desire — and tell a story that secures buy-in and spurs action.
Our vision for claims wasn’t about chasing shiny tech. It was about intentional growth: creating new value for customers and the company within a complex, highly regulated operation. That pitch landed, and it provided strategic direction for two major shifts:
The alignment and consolidation of platforms, processes, and vendors
A proactive pursuit of external partners to help us develop and test the first iterations of the claims experiences we envisioned
DEMO DAYS WAS BORN FROM THAT VISION
As part of the Digital Transformation Office, I continued helping the Claims organization bring that future to life. Working with the Ventures team, we created Demo Days to accelerate our transformation. Demo Days wasn’t a conference or a showcase. It was a repeatable process for sourcing, evaluating, and piloting startup solutions that could help us deliver on our claims vision faster and smarter. And it worked.
I’ve always been fluent in visual communication, and in this case, my skills in data visualization were key. Having been both the person making the pitch and the one evaluating it, I know how much structure can shape the outcome. I co-designed the Demo Days Scoresheet with the Chief Claims Officer, a tool that kept teams focused on business outcomes, not technical flash.
It helped evaluators visualize where each vendor solution fit within the broader claims ecosystem: mapped across the claim workflow (from pre-FNOL to recovery and subrogation) and aligned to high-density, low-complexity perils across auto and property lines of business.
The scoresheet included evaluator prompts such as:
Could it reduce claim volume or cycle time?
Could it increase customer control or satisfaction?
Could it lower expenses or indemnity?
And finally, is it new to the industry? (A solution didn’t have to be new to be a smart business decision, but it did have to be new to be called innovation.)
We weren’t looking for generic “innovation.” We were looking for fit-for-purpose solutions that plugged directly into the operational claims ecosystem we were building.
The results speak for themselves:
Enabled two-way texting between customers and adjusters: 3.6M+ messages sent in year one
Improved estimating turnaround and overflow handling: desk cycle times cut to 2.23 hours
Enabled photo-based property damage documentation with automated 3D models
Each one came out of Demo Days. Each one was grounded in a real use case, scoped for quick learning, and anchored in our 2030 vision.
Just as impressive were the efforts we avoided:
Deployed drone-based inspections, leading to $2M in savings by sunsetting an internal build
Strengthened fraud detection using AI models we couldn’t have resourced internally during platform consolidation
BUT DEMO DAYS WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT TECH
It was a tactical expression of an abundance mindset: If a capability exists in the market, partner. If not, build. But don’t waste time or money reinventing what someone else has already done.
Business growth doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built by design.
That’s what made Demo Days so powerful, the fact that it didn’t happen in isolation. While other carriers were chasing piecemeal fixes, we made partnering a deliberate part of a holistic transformation, guided by a vision I helped create and operationalize. A vision that continues to guide the organization as it evolves.
