Sureify Contributes to Winning Team at IRI Hackathon Advancing Advisor Intelligence with AI

Sureify, a life and annuity technology platform provider for carriers, proudly sponsored and participated on the winning team at the 2026 Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) Hackathon. Team “Hack to the Future” came together to develop an AI-powered advisor support framework that simplifies complex in-force annuity management workflows and surfaces actionable opportunities for advisors.

Designed to bring together a select group of industry leaders and innovators, the IRI Hackathon created a space where carriers, technology providers, and financial institutions worked side-by-side to tackle real operational challenges facing the retirement income industry.

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“The IRI Hackathon is designed to accelerate innovation across the industry. It was exciting to see teams like ‘Hack to the Future’ bring together expertise from across the ecosystem to explore how new technologies can simplify complex processes and improve the advisor experience.” Hannah Pikus, IRI, Director of Digital First Standards – Operations and Technology

Tackling In-Force Complexity

Team “Hack to the Future” included experts from across the retirement ecosystem, including representatives from Morgan Stanley, LUMA Financial Technologies, Brighthouse Financial, Symetra, and Sureify. Together, the group tackled one of the industry’s most persistent operational inefficiencies: fragmented systems and manual processes that slow down advisor workflows and limit visibility into in-force opportunities.
The solution introduced a unified advisor experience powered by AI agents that aggregate data across systems, identify opportunities, and guide advisors through key actions such as replacements, reallocations, and income elections. By automating data-gathering, analysis, and documentation workflows, the framework helps reduce operational friction and improve advisor decision-making.

Turning Fragmented Data into Advisor Action

Managing in-force annuity portfolios today often requires advisors and service teams to navigate multiple carrier portals, inconsistent data formats, and manual compliance checks. These fragmented workflows increase operational costs, slow service timelines, and create missed opportunities for better client outcomes.

Modern digital experiences are no longer measured solely by how much they ease or accelerate a transaction. Today’s expectation is for systems to stay several steps ahead, transforming from passive tools into proactive partners that signal exactly when an agent needs to step in. While most carriers have digitized access to policy information, identifying opportunities such as replacements, reallocations, or income elections often still requires manual analysis across multiple systems.

AI-Driven Advisor Intelligence

The “Hack to the Future” solution demonstrates how AI-driven agents can orchestrate these processes through a single advisor interface. By bringing together policy data, compliance requirements, and opportunity detection into one environment, the framework enables advisors to quickly identify actions that may benefit clients while automatically generating supporting documentation and audit trails.

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“Our team started with annuity replacement as the use case, but the concept quickly expanded into something bigger, an AI-driven framework that helps advisors identify opportunities and take action within a single environment.

What the hackathon validated for me is that the work we’ve been doing with CoreCONNECT over the past several years, unifying data and orchestrating workflows across life and annuity systems, is exactly the foundation these complex advisor experiences require,” said Ben Brantley, CTO at Sureify.

The concept highlights a broader shift toward intelligent automation in retirement products — where AI can support advisors with real-time insights while maintaining the compliance rigor required in regulated financial services.

About Sureify

Sureify has been at the forefront of digital transformation in life and annuity since 2012. Years of experience building digital experiences within the industry’s complex ecosystem have refined our purpose: to solve the data and workflow challenges that hinder modernization. We believe that by creating a truly harmonious system environment, carriers can effectively address today’s most significant business challenges and accelerate their path toward future innovation.

About IRI

The Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) is the leading association for the entire supply chain of insured retirement strategies, including life insurers, asset managers, broker-dealers, banks, marketing organizations, law firms, and solution providers. IRI members account for 90 percent of annuity assets in the U.S., include the foremost distributors of protected lifetime income solutions, and are represented by financial professionals serving millions of Americans. IRI champions retirement security for all through leadership in advocacy, awareness, research, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the advancement of digital solutions within a collaborative industry community.

Contact Info

Sureify – [email protected]