DOCOsoft: How technology is transforming customer experience in the face of major insurance events

When wildfires tore through Southern California in January this year, they caused devastation on a truly massive scale. With more than 18,000 structures damaged or destroyed, and insured losses predicted to reach up to $39.4 billion, the fires tested the insurance industry’s ability to respond at speed, at scale, and under the glare of fierce public scrutiny.

Remarkably, close to $7 billion was paid out to policyholders within just four weeks of the event. What enabled such a rapid response? While recent regulatory reforms and the industry’s strong capital backing were part of the answer to that question, technology was arguably the most decisive factor.

The industry’s response to the 2025 wildfires set a new benchmark for speed and efficiency in the world of claims. Within one week of the event, a single US insurer had already processed more than 8,700 claims and paid out over $1 billion. As the impact of the event worked its way through the market, Lloyd’s syndicates absorbed an estimated $2.3 billion in reinsurance losses. This may have been bruising for underwriting results in the short term, but it failed to put a significant dent in market capitalisation.

As Aidan O’Neill, CEO of P&C claims software specialist DOCOsoft, puts it: ‘The market’s never seen such a rapid response to a major catastrophe event.’

Three themes emerged clearly from the 2025 wildfires, O’Neill suggests: communication, visibility, and speed. ‘The impact of the wildfires was absolutely devastating,’ he notes, ‘and newly homeless customers couldn’t afford to wait months for a settlement.’ Social media amplified the need for an immediate response, as fears circulated that the scale of the event might see insurers defaulting.

In practice, that didn’t happen. The market proved its resilience, although re-rating looks inevitable in the wake of a significant shock to the system. Another notable feature of the event was the extent to which new claims technology proved its worth. Claims platforms equipped with document processing and workflow automation enabled insurers to triage and route incoming claims much faster than in previous events. Remote damage assessment using drones, satellite imagery and AI-enabled property scans allowed insurers to assess total losses with unprecedented speed.

For customers, that meant quicker claims resolutions. For carriers, it meant being able to substantiate claims and trigger reinsurance cover earlier. For example, visual evidence from drone surveys enabled primary carriers to classify entire neighbourhoods as total losses within hours of containment.

Improving customer experience isn’t just about upping satisfaction scores. It’s also about retention and profitability. Research from Accenture predicts that carriers who perform less well could lose up to $170 billion in premiums by 2027 due to poor customer experience.

Technology has the power to alter that equation. AI-powered claims tools now support everything from document summarisation to workflow prioritisation, allowing handlers to focus on high-impact decision-making. As O’Neill explains, ‘A single claims file might contain 50 documents, each of them 50 pages long. Being able to hover a mouse over a file and get an instant summary of the loss it relates to can be a real game-changer at 4:45pm on a Friday night when you have eight claims in your in-box, all status red, and you need to know which to tackle before you clock off.’

Another report, from J.D. Power, suggested that digital satisfaction with claims hit a record 871/1000 in 2024, largely due to investments in app-based and online claims tools. McKinsey predicts that by 2030, more than half of all claims tasks will be handled without human input. But in the world of specialty P&C claims, O’Neill sees technology supporting and extending human expertise, not replacing it.

New technology is not only reshaping insurer-policyholder interactions. It’s also redefining the relationships between insurers and reinsurers. Faster claims processing at the primary level in the aftermath of the California wildfires triggered reinsurance treaties much sooner. That put pressure on reinsurers sooner, testing their ability to respond.

For reinsurers in the London Market, this meant responding with both precision and speed. Real-time modelling, structured loss data, and early notifications from automated claims systems helped make it possible to support cedants when they needed it. Reinsurers ultimately absorbed an estimated $13.3 billion of the wildfire losses, around a third of total insured losses. Bermuda carriers picked up roughly $10 billion of that, while an estimated $2.3 billion ended up with Lloyd’s, underlining the critical role reinsurers play in the global risk chain.

‘Technology meant the whole reinsurance chain operated faster and more transparently after the fires,’ O’Neill says. ‘To make that work, you need to get the right information to the right decision-makers, in the right order, at the right time. Technology has a crucial role to play in ensuring that happens.’

Digitalization initiatives like London’s Blueprint Two will be key to the market’s ability to sustain and build on the progress generated by technologies like drones, geospatial data and automated triage systems – technologies that made such a difference to the industry’s ability to respond fast to the California fires.

But O’Neill stresses the need to stay focused on the things that will make the most practical difference in the short to medium term. ‘It’s not about blindly chasing after AI for its own sake. It’s not about being able to tell the board or your shareholders that you’re doing something with AI. It’s about building boringly consistent systems that give skilled claims professionals what they need to perform at a higher level and deliver when it matters.’

Rather than waiting on market-wide developments, the industry needs to carry on building on the progress it’s already made in showing it can transform operational readiness today by embedding smart tools at key decision points.

Increasing automation in the P&C (re)insurance space is no threat to the role of human claims professionals, O’Neill insists – quite the opposite, in fact. He puts it like this: ‘A claims team making intelligent use of automation and AI will be more competitive than one that isn’t. That’s a given. But we see P&C claims as a sector of the market that will continue to be heavily dependent on its human capital. That means the opportunities will still be there for experienced claims professionals with all the insights they bring, and also for a younger generation of tech-savvy claims professionals who’ll be key to the future of claims.’

Rather than eliminating roles, O’Neill predicts, technology’s main impact in this market will be to do away with humdrum tasks and the drudgery of manual input and retrieval, freeing claims handlers to focus on making decisions, empathising with customers, and resolving the complex or high-value losses where their human experience and expertise is at a premium. Meanwhile, the operational data captured along the way will feed into better underwriting, fraud detection and risk engineering.

The 2025 California wildfires provided a stern test of the industry’s ability to honour its promises under extreme conditions. Integrated technology, intelligent automation and targeted innovation helped ensure the market delivered on those promises.

There’s a profound transformation currently underway in the world of claims. Carriers who embed intelligent technology into the core of their operations aren’t just delivering faster – they’re delivering better. And, in doing so, they’re reshaping their approach to the customer experience from something essentially reactive to something that builds true resilience in the face of all the challenges today’s uncertain world can throw at us.