Impactful insurtech: Solving a real problem or just an annoyance?
The Origins of Pathwork’s AI Life Underwriter
Finding problems that matter
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." – Peter Drucker
In this article, we discuss what makes impactful tech–which requires being honest about making solutions with real value, and not just solving minor annoyances. I’ll use the example of our AI Life Insurance Underwriter solution as an allegory for how we approach creating useful stuff for real, size-able problems.
At Pathwork, we build software tools that couldn’t have existed—or thrived—before AI. In the summer of 2024, we set out to find massive (but overlooked) problems in the life and health insurance sales space—the sleepy, $55B+ market we play in. That’s when we became fascinated by the underwriting process.
Imagine you’re an insurance agent – maybe for some reading this, you actually are. You spend most of your day prospecting to meet new clients, building relationships, and then helping clients find the right solutions. After all that hard work, you seal the deal and the person is ready to buy. But wait… now you have to qualify them and see if the insurance carrier will “underwrite” the risk. Should be easy right? Turns out, it’s not.
Changing the paradigm
"People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." – Theodore Levitt
We set a high bar for our solution: it needed to be magical. It must take advantage of the latest technology advancements and be worth the effort of changing behavior.
Most previous software solutions in this space aimed to organize underwriting work—helping people do the same tasks slightly faster. But making a legacy process more efficient wasn’t enough. With AI, we realized we could build something that doesn’t just assist an agent or underwriting—it does the work for them.
Getting intimate with the pain
"If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle." – Jim Stengel
To build our solution, we spoke to dozens of insurance agents and underwriters.We got in the mud. We asked a lot of questions. We even sold $XX,000 worth of insurance premium to feel it firsthand. The objective was to uncover the real friction points in the underwriting process. Here’s what we learned:
✅ Agents don’t want to talk about their clients’ health: They want to build relationships and solve needs, not navigate medical questionnaires.
✅ But agents also don’t want to rely on others: Their commissions depend on getting deals closed, and waiting on underwriters adds friction.
✅ Every case gets the same energy: Whether it’s a small policy or a large one, agents put in the effort—often without knowing if the deal will go through.
🚨 And yet, their managers, BGAs, and carrier partners don’t always have the same urgency: People are human, bandwidth is limited, and priorities skew toward high ROI cases.
These numbers identified there was real value to create :
A well-underwritten application has a 75%+ placement rate.
A misunderwritten application drops to 15-20%—costing agencies and carriers at minimum $500 to fix. In a market with 10M+ applications per year.
We saw these pain points show up in two key processes:
Field Underwriting – The upfront work to assess if a client qualifies.
Quick Quotes / Pre-Qualification – The “fast answer” agents need to move forward.
So we looked to build a solution…
The Solution
"Secrecy is the linchpin of intrigue." – Robert Greene
If you’ve made it this far, you might expect me to fully reveal our solution. But here’s the truth: the best way to understand it is to see it.
Today, in January 2025, our ideal customers are life and LTC-focused insurance agencies, BGAs, IMOs, and carriers. If that’s you, we’d love to connect—learn about your challenges, and show you how our AI underwriter actually does the work for you.
For those in the industry or not, we’ve pulled together a quick visual of how we designed our solution. Message me, ian@pathworklife.com, to learn more.
