The Talent P&C Insurance Has Been Searching For Has Been Here All Along

Every weekend, I stand on a soccer field coaching athletes that most of corporate America has never seriously considered hiring. I coach Special Olympics soccer, Unified teams, Miracle League baseball, and other adaptive sports teams. I am also the father of a son afflicted with Down Syndrome. And for 25 years, I have worked in risk, analytics, and insurance.

Image Courtsey: Real Madrid Foundation

So let me tell you what I see on that field that I rarely see in a claims call center.

I see a young man notice, before any adult does, that a teammate is having a hard day, walk over, and sit with him until he is ready to play. I see athletes who lose a game and then run to congratulate the other team, genuinely happy for them. I see patience that does not run out, presence that does not fake itself, and warmth that no script, no QA rubric, and no empathy training module has ever managed to manufacture.

Now think about the hardest moment in our industry. A policyholder calls after a hurricane has taken her roof, or a wildfire has taken everything. She is not calling for a coverage explanation. She is calling because her life just broke, and the person on the other end of that line is the face of the promise she paid premiums for over twenty years.

We have spent a century trying to engineer empathy into that moment. Scripts. Sentiment scoring. Soft skills training. Customer experience transformations. NPS programs. And still, the number one complaint in claims is not speed or settlement amount. It is how people were made to feel.

Here is my honest, professional assessment as someone who has built analytics practices and sold claims transformation for a living: people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are naturally better at the very thing our industry has failed to solve.

This is not an inclusion argument. This is a capability argument.

I am deliberately not writing this as an appeal for the industry to make room. People with IDD do not need a favor from P&C insurance. The industry needs a capability it does not have, and this community has it in abundance. That is called a labor market match, and we should treat it like one.

Consider what is actually happening to insurance work right now. AI is absorbing the rote layer at remarkable speed. Document intake, coverage verification, first-pass triage, subrogation identification, correspondence drafting. The work that remains, and the work that will increasingly define competitive advantage, is the human layer: sitting with a frustrated customer, de-escalating anger without taking it personally, making a claimant feel seen while the machines handle the paperwork.

Neurotypical employees often struggle in exactly these moments. Burnout in claims and customer care is chronic. Turnover in contact centers routinely runs high enough to destroy any training investment. Frustrated customers wear people down because most of us absorb hostility as a personal attack.

Many individuals with Down Syndrome and other IDD conditions process those moments differently. The frustration is not received as an insult to deflect. It is received as a person who needs help. That is not sentimentality on my part. Ask anyone who has spent real time in this community, any coach, any employer who has actually hired from it. The emotional steadiness, the absence of ego in the interaction, the genuine pleasure in helping another person, these are consistent, observable traits. Employers outside our industry have already proven the business case: distribution centers and retailers that built IDD-inclusive workforces have reported retention and reliability that outperform their conventional benchmarks, in some documented cases dramatically so.

Where they already fit, today, with no new job architecture required

• Claims support and FNOL assistance: greeting, intake support, status callbacks, the human check-in that adjusters never have time for
• Customer care and policyholder services: especially retention-sensitive touchpoints where warmth outperforms speed
• Document and mailroom operations, scanning, indexing, and claims file assembly: structured work where consistency and care matter
• Quality review support: pattern-based checking of files, forms, and correspondence
• Facilities, hospitality, and agency front-of-house roles that shape how a brand feels when you walk in

Where the AI era creates roles that did not exist before

This is the part that excites me most. As AI hollows out transactional work, it creates a new class of roles that are almost purpose-built for this talent pool:

• Human-in-the-loop reviewers: AI drafts, a human confirms. Structured, repeatable, essential.
• AI training and data annotation support: labeling claims photos, categorizing documents, validating extraction outputs
• Catastrophe response comfort roles: dedicated team members at CAT sites and in CAT call queues whose entire job is presence, patience, and follow-through, while adjusters and algorithms handle the technical file
• Claimant companions: a consistent human voice who stays with a policyholder through the life of a complex claim, so no one ever feels handed off to a system
• Community and agency ambassadors: the face of an industry that badly needs to be trusted again

Notice the pattern. Every one of these roles exists because cost and margin pressure is pushing carriers to automate. The economics that are eliminating some jobs are simultaneously making the human jobs more valuable, and more specialized. Carriers that staff that human layer with people who are genuinely, constitutionally good at it will win on the metrics that actually drive lifetime value: trust, retention, and claims satisfaction.

What it takes, honestly

I will not pretend this is effortless. It takes job carving, structured onboarding, coaching support, and managers willing to lead differently. Every serious operational capability an insurer has ever built required investment. This one has the added feature of being deeply resistant to commoditization. A competitor can copy your pricing model in a quarter. They cannot copy a culture.

My son will enter the workforce in a few years. I am not writing this so that someone makes a place for him. I am writing this because I have watched him, and hundreds of athletes like him, do the exact thing our industry pays consultants millions to teach and still cannot deliver: make a person in a hard moment feel like they matter.

P&C insurance sells one product. A promise to show up on the worst day of someone’s life. There is an entire community of people who show up like that naturally, every single day, and they have been standing right in front of us.

They do not need to earn a seat in this industry. The seat has always been theirs. We just need to stop leaving it empty.

I coach Special Olympics soccer, Unified sports, Miracle League baseball, and adaptive tennis in North Carolina, and I have spent 25+ years in risk, analytics, and P&C insurance. If you are a carrier, TPA, or MGA leader thinking about how to build the human layer of an AI-enabled operation, reach out to me for a discussion through my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kushalwrites/