The AI Promise Unfulfilled: Why Your Life & Annuity Data Isn’t Ready for AI

Four foundational steps to build an AI-ready data pipeline.

Sureify | July 17, 2025

Within life and annuity, many AI projects fail not due to a lack of ambition but because their data isn’t AI-ready. Gartner predicts that 60% of AI projects lacking AI-ready data will be abandoned by 2026.

To help overcome this, carriers should focus on four key steps:

Connect to Your Core Systems: Rather than replacing legacy systems, integrate core system data in a unified manner using APIs. This approach, similar to Amazon’s Selling Partner API, enables fluid, real-time data movement, which is crucial for training and deploying AI.
Transform Data into Unified Views: Consolidate both structured and unstructured data from various systems into consistent, API-accessible unified views. This ensures data consistency, provides historical context for AI models, and reduces the load on core systems. Implementing fine-grained authentication and access models is also vital for secure data access.
Support Data with Workflows: AI-ready data requires thinking about “data in motion.” A robust workflow infrastructure is essential for orchestrating the complex processes involved in training and deploying AI. Learning from pioneers like Uber, adopting resilient workflow platforms (like Temporal) can ensure graceful recovery from potential points of failure in AI-powered customer journeys.
Establish a Foundation for Compliance: Workflow data is crucial for compliance. A detailed, step-by-step workflow history is necessary to satisfy regulators, providing a record of how AI-powered transactions were processed and the rationale behind each step. Emerging standards, such as Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), will further enable the retention of user conversational and interaction history, which is vital for future AI compliance.

While it may not be the most glamorous work, focusing on “data plumbing” is the most critical factor for AI projects to generate substantial returns. Sureify’s CoreCONNECT engine provides the crucial cross-system data and workflow capabilities needed to implement new technologies, such as AI, effectively. Dustin Yoder, the founder and CEO of Sureify, recently explored this topic in detail with Insurance Innovation Reporter. Read his full article here.