An Epic Year of Transformation with AI and Next-Gen Insurance Tech

As 2025 comes to a close, it’s a chance to step back and reflect on everything this year brought us – big wins, challenges, and transformative changes. The insurance industry is transforming fast, and AI has played a key role in driving this surge of growth and change.

Let's dive into a recap of what we accomplished this year at Applied Systems and where we're headed in 2026 and beyond.

Innovating with Our New AI-Powered Products

Insurance agencies in 2025 continued to face challenges that put a strain on their operations and customer relationships. At Applied Systems, AI is at the center in our vision for the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance. As your leader in insurance-specific AI, we've been working hard to create AI-powered technology that will empower your agency to reduce friction, work more efficiently, and provide amazing client experiences.

Here are a few of our AI-powered tech from 2025:

Applied Recon™: Leveraging AI, Applied Recon consolidates accounting workflows in a single, secure system in Applied Epic®. Agencies no longer need multiple reconciliation tools, and they'll see their administrative overhead reduced.

Applied Book Builder: Say hello to AI risk intelligence. AI is used to enrich commercial risk profiles based on thousands of publicly available sources to round out risk profiles and identify coverage gaps within existing policies. Applied Book Builder replaces hours of manual research with automatically enriched risk profiles and helps agencies grow a more profitable book.

Applied Epic Bridge: The new Outlook add-in for Applied Epic automatically recognizes the correct Epic account based on the email addresses of a communication being viewed in Outlook. The power of AI summarizes emails in an Activity Note and attaches it to Epic, making your email documentation a streamlined, quick process.

Product Enhancements That Push You Forward

While we love creating new products for our customers, we're committed to investing in improving our core technology capabilities and launching new features across our product portfolio. These ongoing innovations empower insurance agencies to overcome challenges and use technology that grows with them.

Let's take a look at some of the product enhancements from the year.

Renewals

Personal Lines Renewal Insights: The new insights provide policy premium and policy detail comparisons in an Activity Note and PDF that highlights differences between current and renewal premiums, such as the amount of the premium increase. Insurance agencies will also have context on what changed during the term that may be impacting the increase.

Benefits

Benefits Overview Screen: Users have a consolidated look into key account information like activities, plans, contacts, and Benefits details, making it easier to find and take action on plan-level information.

Automated Dental Quoting: Experience dental quoting and plan design that's fully integrated alongside existing small group medical workflows for comparison, modeling, and quoting in real-time. It eliminates the need for manual re-entry, reduces errors and E&O exposure, and gives your team more time for other tasks.

Financial Management

Integrated Lockbox: Does paper check processing slow you down? Integrated Lockbox in Applied Pay™ routes paper checks to centralized processing centers across the country where they're sorted, scanned and digitized. This speeds up the availability of funds and reduces manual errors.

Improved Checkout Experience: Insureds now have a more flexible and faster checkout by using existing accounts that are already connected to financial accounts. Whether they're paying on desktop or mobile, this includes digital wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Enhancements to Premium Finance: Now includes the addition of insured-led workflows, Embedded Premium Finance Pay on Account, and Premium Finance for Non-Accord Lines – making it easier for your clients to obtain premium financing. It also makes it easier for you to close deals.

Marketing Automation

Drag & Drop Email Builder: Looking to easily create and deliver informative marketing campaigns? This new feature in Applied Marketing Automation® provides intuitive design tools and seamless access to content from Applied's Content Library. Easily tailor layouts and templates to align with your unique brand elements to ensure consistency across all communications.

Explore More Product News

These are only some of the product releases from this year. We're proud of many other exciting new capabilities across Applied Systems' portfolio, like the instant certificate validation from Applied CSR24® or Applied Identity for Indio. Check out our product release hub for more detailed descriptions and a larger list of the latest product enhancements for insurance agencies.

Insuring Innovation Video Series

We launched our exciting new series, Insuring Innovation, this year. Each month our host, Jesse Gomez, senior solutions specialist with Applied's customer success team, covers the latest developments and news in the insurance industry. Every episode dives into a new topic of interest for insurance professionals, highlights the latest innovations in Insurtech, and informs viewers with insightful forecasts on the future of insurance.

The purpose behind this series is simple: To improve the insurance experience for everyone in the industry. Sharing our team's expertise and product knowledge will empower you to embrace future developments in the industry. And of course, we want to help you grow your agency and stay competitive.

Watch Insuring Innovation on YouTube and don't forget to subscribe to get future episodes in your inbox!

Proud to be Recognized Among the Best

We're honored to be recognized for our commitment to creating an outstanding employee experience, leadership within the industry, and innovation from our products and services.

What it Means to be Great Place to Work Certified

The Great Place To Work^® Certification is more than just a badge. It's the most definitive "employer-of-choice" recognition that companies strive to achieve, and it all stems from our employees' feedback on their workplace experience. Most importantly, how consistently they experience a high-trust workplace. We couldn't do the work we do without our team, and we're committed to fostering a positive and inclusive environment for all.

The Great Place to Work Certification and rankings on the Fortune and Newsweek lists demonstrate our commitment to upholding a culture developed on values that make us indispensable to each other and our customers.– Bridget Penney, Chief People Officer, Applied Systems

Other Ways Applied Systems Was Recognized in 2025

Here are some of the other ways we've been recognized this year:

• Honored with three 2025 Stevie® Awards
• Recognized as a Fast Company Top Workplace for Innovators
• Earned Dual Honors with SaaS Award and 5-Star Tech Provider Recognition

Looking Ahead

When we think about our vision for the future and the new Intelligent Insurance Era, AI is at the center. As your leader in insurance-focused AI, our technology isn't one-size-fits-all. Industry-specific AI, also known as Vertical AI, tailors its abilities to meet unique needs. Compared to Horizontal AI, which is a more general kind of technology, it offers greater automation and optimization for users.

We have decades of deep insurance expertise, along with the richest insurance-specific datasets to create solutions for all the complex parts of your business.

Last year, we acquired Planck™ to accelerate the integration of advanced AI capabilities across our solutions. We continued with our investments in AI by acquiring Cytora™, the industry's leading risk digitization platform. The combination of Cytora's insurance-specific AI platform with Applied's suite of insurance solutions for agencies, carriers, and MGAs will enhance connectivity and collaboration across each stage of the policy lifecycle.

This is only the beginning of unlocking the power of AI and the value it can bring to the insurance industry. We're excited to continue to grow as AI does and deliver transformative technology to your business

What’s Our Why? Helping You Win

Whether we're developing new products, enhancing existing ones or creating new educational series, you're at the heart of what we do. Applied Systems upholds our promise to listen to the needs of insurance agents and provide innovation that helps you grow and succeed. AI promises to transform the insurance industry, and we promise to create powerful products that do just that.

We're proud of our work in 2025 and look forward to another year of innovative growth! Check out our product hub for the newest enhancements and sign up for a demonstration of our technology.