Keynote: 2025 Insurance Innovators USA Conference

What Sesame Street Can Teach Us About Insurance Innovation

Yesterday, I delivered my first keynote at the 2025 Insurance Innovators USA Conference, hosted by Marketforce Live. Held in Nashville’s Music City Center, the conference brought together thousands of insurance professionals, each one focused on pushing innovation forward in a industry still shaped by old technology, rising costs, and worsening risks.

When a producer called to invite me to speak, she asked me to share my experience "Achieving Genuine Customer-Centricity in Claims." And even though I have diagrams illustrating claims journeys and requirements from every point of view, I opened my keynote with the origin story of Sesame Street.

Because the topic may be innovation, but the goal is loyalty. And loyalty comes from delivering something people actually need, in a way that fits in with how they live. That’s what Sesame Street did for early education. And it’s what insurance can do for resilience.

Efficiency Is Not a Differentiator

Technology vendors are all pitching the same thing: efficiency. And maybe that sounds like a differentiator in an inefficient industry… until you realize the vendors are selling these solutions to everyone. Companies don’t stand out by being slightly faster than their competitors. They stand out by creating new and different value.

That was the message I brought to the audience, to the delight of the producer, who said, "That was so fun! It's great to hear a completely new perspective on the topic."

Customer-Centricity Means Product-Centric Thinking

One audience member put it best: “I like how you challenged us to think about product design in addition to customer experience design.”

Exactly. Because if we’re serious about putting customers first, we have to create offerings that support their goals, not just make transactions easier.

That’s why I shared the story of leading the creation of strategic vision for claims at a Fortune 250 insurance carrier. We didn’t start with how to speed up payments. We started with how to make a really bad day, like the day a customer's car is stolen, a little more manageable by offering a lot more support. Then we designed the services and the tech to support that vision.

That approach helped us align five companies, reduce operational costs by 20%, and build the foundation for award-winning innovation.

If You Want Loyalty, Stop Relying on Improvements

Creating the things customers ask for isn't innovation, it's just process improvement. Customers don't know what's possible. That's our job. Loyalty comes when you create something customers need, something they didn’t expect but suddenly can’t live without.

And that kind of vision doesn’t come from a tech roadmap. It comes from design leadership. From imagining the role insurance could play in people’s lives, and then using technology to make it real.

The Future Belongs to the Storytellers

Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of work (and called on the expertise of some top-tier coaches) to learn how to share my expertise without boring the pants off people. One mentor implored me to "Dumb it down, for heavens sake," and I'm giving that feedback everything I've got.

By most accounts (see producer and attendee comments above), I’m making strides. Of course, there’s always room for improvement.

During my keynote, I made the point that advanced tech comes at a high price, so I believe it should be used to create high value for people. I illustrated this with another example: an AI solution my team designed to support agents, customers, and the bottom line by augmenting the personal insurance review process.

Then I showed data that equates training a single large AI model with the carbon dioxide emissions of 300 round-trip flights between New York and California.

When I walked off stage, the state MC said, “That was really dense. You should calculate the emissions of trying to make sense of your talk.”

Like everything else worth doing, storytelling with both style and substance is an ongoing practice, not a box I’m aiming to check off. I’ll take my keynote back to the drawing board for further refinement. But I’ll take dense over generic any day, because telling a story that makes people think is how change begins.