Ali Got a Promotion. Linda Is Still Waiting.

Most presentations at ITC Europe in Barcelona last month were about AI. Holm Schimanski's was about people.

tigerlab’s Partner and Chief AI Officer took the stage with a deliberate choice: no AI pitch, no product demo. Instead, he opened with a question, "Are there any brokers in the room?" The argument that followed was worth paying attention to. Technology has changed almost every role in insurance. But not equally. And the people left furthest behind are the ones carrying the heaviest operational load.

To make the point, he introduced two people.

Ali is a Product Solution Architect at tigerlab. Two years ago, the role looked like most engineering jobs: write code, ship features, review pull requests. Today, he writes no code at all. He designs systems, orchestrates complex architectures and sits in business conversations he would never have joined before. He moved up the value chain because his environment moved with him.

Linda is a different story.

Fourteen years of experience. Over 400 clients. A certified insurance professional with a genuine command of risk, product and people. She works for a large broker management organisation in Hamburg. And she is still stuck. Not because of anything she has or has not done, but because the system around her never changed.

She still operates on a broker management platform built 20 years ago. She has developed muscle memory for it: roughly 20 clicks to complete each process. When she wants an automation, she files a ticket with IT and waits. Not days. Months.

Linda, Schimanski notes, is a composite drawn from real conversations with brokers across Europe. But her situation is not unusual. In his assessment, it is the norm.

"Broker operations today are held back by fragmented workflows and legacy systems that simply weren't built for how the industry operates globally," he says. 

The problem is not Linda's capability. It is her environment. She works inside a large, regulated enterprise where compliance, procurement and legal sit between any employee and any new tool. She cannot sign up for an AI subscription on her own initiative. The system prevents it.

This is the distinction Schimanski wants the industry to hold onto. AI adoption in insurance is not a willingness problem. It is an environment problem.

tigerlab's response is a principle it calls co-creation of value. Rather than shipping features and waiting for feedback, the approach starts with shared business goals before a single line of code is written: renewal rates, claims handling speed, and growth in book of business. Users like Linda are in the room from the start, not consulted after the fact.

"We want to stop shipping features. Brokers don't care about features. They want to create value," Schimanski says.

The platform also has to serve as the compliant environment Linda currently lacks: GDPR-aligned, DORA-ready, ISO-certified. Not as incidentals, but as the conditions that make it possible for someone in Linda's position to actually use the tools available to her.

The results so far are significant. Earlier this year, tigerlab announced the global rollout of its Broker Management System across more than 30 countries. In early deployments, brokers processed documentation and routine transactions up to ten times faster than on prior systems. Ten countries are already live. The remaining 20 follow before the end of the year.

"Had you told me three years ago we would be onboarding 30 countries in one year, I would have said you were crazy. Nowadays, it's a relatively easy thing to do," Schimanski says.

The harder thing, it turns out, is not the technology. It is making sure the “Lindas” of the industry finally get to use it.

Schimanski's full tech talk from ITC Europe Barcelona is available to watch on the ITC Europe YouTube channel. To learn more about tigerlab's Broker Management System and how it is being deployed across global broker networks, visit tigerlab.com and book a demo.