The World Economic Forum issued a report called "Future of Jobs 2025" at the beginning of this year. The report comprehensively covered the world's industries, asking representatives for more than 1,000 employers how they expect technology, economic, environmental and societal changes to impact the various classes of workers they employ.

The report includes a lot of data, but of most interest to me is that "Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators" has the 15th highest likelihood to decline in the next five years. The WEF ranked more than 100 types of workers. In 13th place was graphic designers. So, put in stark terms: Claims adjusters and graphic designers are in the same boat when it comes to relative job security.

This piqued my interest because my wife went to college for design, and though her career has taken her to different places, she knows quite a few designers who are struggling in the current job market. Increasingly easy-to-use design tools like Canva and generative AI applications have lowered demand for graphic designers that are highly skilled in Photoshop and Illustrator, for example.

Meanwhile, I hear from insurers fairly regularly that their claims adjusters are overtaxed and struggling with inefficient processes, and those carriers are often seeking solutions to transform efficiency within their claims organizations. And, insurers tell surveyors like Jacobsen and Aon, who do an insurance labor market survey twice a year, that claims professionals are at the top of their lists for recruitment consistently.

So in that context -- where one job is already seeing declines due to technological disruption and the other is still relatively manual -- how could their decline sync up?

One answer in the WEF report is that insurance companies expect technology -- not the economy, societal inputs, or environmental concerns -- to account for most of the reduction in human work in the next five years. I often say that there's a lot of "headroom" in insurance -- that as white-collar jobs go, insurance is among the most manually intensive. The rapid ascendance of AI, which can account for more of the idiosyncracies in insurance processes than previous iterations of automation, holds a lot of promise for increasing efficiency across the value chain, especially in claims.

So, even though insurers today are starved for claims adjusters as net losses have increased rapidly since COVID, they may be looking at a future where the average adjuster has a range of technology tools in front of them that allow for speedier resolution of the average claim.

Another difference is in recruiting challenges. There are more people who want to be graphic designers than insurance adjusters. Insurers who still are reliant on highly manual workflow and aren't effectively leveraging technology to increase efficiency in their claims organization face a risk of running out of experienced workers before the solutions that the next generation will use are fully bakes. That creates a short-term need to fill open positions on the team, but a long-term view that retirements will be more easily absorbed by the tech-enabled adjuster of the future.

It's another indication of the unique dynamics of the insurance industry that are best solved by technology solutions that are developed from insurance first principles. While graphic design is easily democratized by tech, driving worker surpluses that change the landscape of the industry, claims adjusting is less so. The sophistication of the tools that will define the insurance workflow of the future is exciting to imagine -- and we've already seen glimpses of them in our Model Insurer awards and our Generative AI showcase. How is your claims organization using tech to retain and retrain adjusters in this dynamic time for P&C insurance? I'd love to hear what you have in the works.