Federato underwriting survey findings landed on Tuesday, July 21, 2026, in the 2026 State of P&C Insurance Technology report, drawn from 750 US property and casualty professionals at carriers, managing general agents, and MGA aggregators. The headline is a 64-point gap: 91 percent of leaders on one measure against 27 percent of underwriters on another.

What the Federato Underwriting Survey Reports

The Federato underwriting survey supporting numbers are consistent and unflattering. Underwriters navigate an average of 6.8 systems, up from 6.4 a year earlier. Wasted underwriting effort climbed from 26 percent to 31 percent. Severe appetite drift, meaning business written outside stated risk appetite, nearly doubled from 18 to 39 percent. Federato puts the coordination tax at five hours per employee per week, or about $10,145 annually.

Only 23 percent of insurers report AI fully integrated into their systems. Against that group, organizations with full integration were 3.6 times more likely to report real-time portfolio control. Chief executive Will Ross noted that every leader he speaks with now “has AI as a top two or three line-item at the board level.”

The Federato Underwriting Survey Gap Compares Two Questions

Read the detailed Federato underwriting survey finding rather than the headline. Federato states that 91 percent of leaders report good or full visibility into key performance indicators, while 27 percent of underwriters report real-time portfolio control. Those are different questions.

Visibility into KPIs is not portfolio control. Federato defines real-time control as whether teams can see and act on performance as it happens rather than relying on periodic reporting. Acting on data is a higher bar than seeing a dashboard, so some of the 64 points is definitional rather than perceptual. Federato itself slips between the two framings, headlining that 91 percent of leaders report real-time portfolio control while its own bullet says visibility into KPIs. The Federato underwriting survey contains a cleaner comparison elsewhere: 93 percent of leaders believe guidelines are applied consistently, against 88 percent of employees reporting deviations. That one asks closer to the same thing of both groups.

Margins the Federato Underwriting Survey Does Not Break Out

The stated margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 points at 95 percent confidence, and that figure describes the full sample of 750. The 91 and the 27 are subgroup results from leaders and underwriters respectively, each drawn from a fraction of that base and each carrying a wider band.

Federato does not publish subgroup margins. Other vendors do, and the contrast is instructive when a single subgroup comparison is the centerpiece of an entire report. The direction of the finding is almost certainly right. The precision implied by a two-digit gap is not established.

The Industry Backdrop the Federato Underwriting Survey Uses

Two contextual figures in the Federato underwriting survey deserve correction. US property and casualty direct premiums written crossed $1 trillion in 2024 and reached roughly $1.11 trillion in 2025, so the milestone is real if slightly dated in the telling.

The claim that nearly half the 100 largest carriers destroyed shareholder value needs more care. It traces to the ACORD 2025 Value Creation Study, released that December, which found 48 of 100 insurers failed to generate cash flow exceeding an 8.2 percent cost of capital measured over 20 years. That is a two-decade return test, not a 2025 result. The trend is genuinely deteriorating, with 9 destroyers in a 2021 comparable study and 36 three years ago.

Yet 2025 itself was the industry’s best underwriting year in a decade, with a combined ratio of 93 and underwriting income of $61.2 billion, up from $23 billion. Pairing a trillion-dollar market with a value-destruction statistic implies an industry in crisis during a year it posted its strongest result in ten.

The Shadow AI Number Is the Real Federato Underwriting Survey Story

Federato sells underwriting workflow software, so it has an obvious stake in a story where fragmented, bolted-on AI is the villain and integrated platforms are the cure. The 3.6x finding is also correlational. Organizations able to fully integrate AI are probably better resourced and better run before any software arrives, which is the same selection problem that undermines most vendor AI attribution claims.

None of that makes the 91-versus-27 pattern fictional. Anyone around enterprise software recognizes it. Leadership buys a tool, checks a dashboard, declares the problem solved, while the people keying data into seven systems live differently. That gap appears in nearly every software category and says more about rollout than about any vendor.

What should worry compliance teams more than the coordination tax is the shadow AI number. Some 89 percent report using unsanctioned tools, though the question asked about use at least occasionally, which is a low bar worth stating. Even discounted, that is a governance problem. Some of those people are feeding proprietary underwriting data, possibly customer information, into consumer-grade products never designed for either. That is an errors-and-omissions exposure, not a productivity one, and no single platform fixes it.

What to Watch After the Federato Underwriting Survey

Worth noting that Federato raised $100 million around June 2026, roughly five weeks before publishing research concluding that integrated platforms are the answer. That timing does not make the data wrong. It does explain the framing.

State insurance regulators citing this specific survey is possible but not the sharpest signal, since the NAIC model bulletin on AI use already gives states a framework. The better test is replication. If an independent body, a regulator, or a rival vendor with opposite incentives surveys shadow AI use and lands near 89 percent, the governance problem is confirmed and urgent. If independent numbers come in far lower, the figure was an artifact of question wording. Either result matters more than whether a Federato underwriting survey statistic makes it into a rulemaking footnote.

Sources: the report announcement is from Federato, the value creation study was covered by Carrier Management, and 2025 industry results were reported by Insurance Journal.

Fintechbits covers insurance technology, underwriting systems, and AI governance in financial services. Nothing here constitutes financial or investment advice. All analysis represents the editorial views of Fintechbits.