By Jill Coffer, VP, Product & Technology Operations, People Management & Communications at EIS
AI adoption doesn’t happen because a company buys tools or announces a strategy. It happens when people understand the technology and where the technology fits into the work they already do.
At EIS, that became clear as our AI strategy accelerated. Leadership was aligned and our product direction was moving forward, but we wanted our team members who were working daily with our clients to feel more involved in developing our product roadmap.
We wanted AI to become part of how EIS operates, our people needed more than access to tools. They needed to move beyond fluency and experience the power to connect AI for insurance companies to the real business problems they were working on day to day.
For insurers evaluating technology partners, that matters. A vendor’s internal innovation model is a preview of how it helps customers evolve. If a partner can’t turn its own AI ambition into governed, useful capability, it’s fair to ask how well it can help an insurer do the same.
Innovation needs a system behind it, which was a part of what we’ve been able to harness with our annual hackathons.
They weren’t standalone employee events or “build something cool” competitions. They were designed to help teams learn AI, apply it to real business problems, and connect strong ideas to the future of EIS OneSuite™ powered by CoreGentic™.
In many companies today, AI initiatives live outside the core, tucked into labs, sandboxes, or standalone copilots. Those efforts can generate interesting insights, but insight alone doesn’t change real workflows in how an insurer quotes, issues policies, manages billing, processes claims, or serves customers.
With our AI approach, we wanted to change that, and our goal is to anchor every idea into the practical, daily insurance workflows of quoting, policy, billing, claims, and servicing. The thought here is that AI only creates real value when it can trigger actions within business operations, not just generate more output.
From there, the structure of our hackathons were intentional, and teams were judged on strategic fit, execution, innovation, complexity, presentation, and technical alignment. Leaders sponsored the work, reviewed submissions, and helped determine which ideas had a path toward roadmap conversations.
That gave teams creative room without losing business focus. Insurers know why this matters. A bold AI vision will not fix fragmented data, rigid workflows, slow configuration, or brittle integrations. Progress requires the right foundation underneath the idea.
If adoption is the problem, then participation is the solution.
At EIS, we’ve leaned into this by inviting our people to the table, creating structured, hands-on opportunities for teams to build, experiment, and apply AI in the context of real business problems.
It’s what the hackathon represents: a system designed to engage people in meaningful ways.
During our most recent hackathon, teams didn’t start with abstract ideas, they started with real friction points in their day-to-day work.
This includes engineers, product managers, architects, analysts, implementation experts, and customer-facing teams. They understand how our products work, where insurance operations slow down, and what customers are trying to accomplish.
The hackathons have given these teams a practical way to turn that knowledge into action. In our first one, more than 300 employees voluntarily participated in AI workshops before the hackathon began — this matters because people can’t experiment confidently with technology they’re still trying to understand.
Once teams had that foundation, they formed cross-functional groups, worked across time zones, and built concepts tied to quoting, billing, claims, testing, configuration, API discovery, and developer productivity.
AI wasn’t something our people were being pushed into, they quickly learned it was something they could use to solve problems they knew well.
While a hackathon creates an exciting burst of energy around innovation, it doesn’t drive meaningful, lasting impact on its own.
At EIS, strong concepts were reviewed against product strategy, customer value, technical fit, governance needs, and implementation realities.
Ideas were evaluated for possible implementation into the EIS platform, and demos were created by the teams to show how their concepts could integrate into the existing platform.
This follow-through matters because many AI efforts stall between “interesting prototype” and “usable capability.”
Closing that gap takes ownership, roadmap alignment, security review, governance, and a clear view of business value.
The same is true for insurers: innovation can’t just stay in a lab or as a POC experiment.
It has to actually reach and integrate with policy, billing, claims, distribution, customer experience, reporting, and the everyday workflows that determine how quickly a carrier can move.
With our goal of making innovation something that permeated all aspects of our company, our hackathons produced concrete outcomes, not just internal excitement.
In 2024, the hackathon brought together 26 teams who each submitted impressive projects, including a Smart Quote Generator, an AI demand management optimization tool for business analysts, and BillBrain, an AI co-pilot for billing setup.
In 2025, teams from around the globe worked within a 50-hour window to build live demos connected to EIS OneSuite powered by CoreGentic, and once again produced incredible wins toward our product roadmap.
We’re gearing up for our 2026 hackathon now, and very excited to see what our teams produce after another year of working directly with top-level insurers and integrating AI.
There is no shortage of vendors talking about AI, but insurers don’t need more talk — they need partners that can help turn innovation into operational advantage.
That means asking better questions about potential platform vendors:
For EIS, our internal innovation model connects directly to what we build for customers. EIS OneSuite powered by CoreGentic is designed around the same belief: innovation should be practical, governed, flexible, and close to the work.
With AI at the core, natural-language control, agentic orchestration, and secure governance, insurers can move faster without turning every change into a custom development project.
Hosting an annual hackathon isn’t a competitive advantage on its own — the advantage is the system behind it:
Participation creates ownership, ownership drives adoption, and adoption creates more measurable outcomes than would’ve been there without this participation model.
That is what EIS has built internally, and it is what ambitious insurers should expect from any technology partner helping them become more agile, innovative, and ready for what comes next.
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