Now more than ever, the entire world recognizes the need for speed, accuracy, and effectiveness for creating and managing data, information, and knowledge. This is also true for every link in the insurance value chain. Critical progress is being rapidly made in the front, middle, and back offices while creating workspace social distancing. Responding to the current pandemic crisis is accelerating digital transformation and cloud adoption everywhere.

The cloud is office-less. The dynamic and interconnected parts of the world are complex. This complexity creates a need for having and seeing data to make decisions faster and smarter when reacting to change. At the same time, results and findings need to be incorporated into the next moment, so knowing and using the data are now more critical than ever for shortening the time from insight to action.

The successes to date in response to COVID-19 could only be possible with data, AI, and cloud capabilities. We predict these data, AI, and cloud experiences will be the new normal expectation from leadership, shareholders, employees, vendors, and customers. Office work and agency storefront visits may never be the same as customers, employees, agents, and vendors adopt touch-free, socially distanced, digital experiences with the help of data, AI, and cloud.

New AI capabilities for using more types of data in more types of decisions centered on individual customers’ personalized living situations are literally coming up all the time in this era of competition. And the COVID crisis will be spawning all sorts of newer, smarter, and bigger ways to solve longstanding problems of dealing with manual processes and remote access by knowledge workers and analytics staff.

The only thing certain is more of everything – data, analytics, and decision opportunities. You can’t ignore the advantages of cost, scale, performance, and value of the cloud.