BriteCore's AI Bet: Turn Your Core System Into an Agent Platform

The press release says BriteCore launched eight AI copilots. That is true, and it is also the least interesting thing in the announcement.

Buried one paragraph deep is a line that matters: BriteCore is offering carriers a secure Model Context Protocol service layer. Carriers and ecosystem partners can build and deploy their own AI agents on the same infrastructure BriteCore uses for its native copilots. In plain terms, BriteCore is not selling you a tool. It is selling you a platform where it supplies some of the agents and you supply the rest.

"The future of insurance operations is an intelligent core platform where AI agents safely coordinate work across the enterprise," CEO Ray Villeneuve said, "while insurers remain fully in control of the decisions, governance, and customer relationships that matter most."

The competitive timing is the real story. Duck Creek announced its own agentic AI platform at its Formation 26 conference on April 27. BriteCore's announcement came exactly one month later. These are the two largest cloud-native core insurance platforms competing directly to own the agentic layer before Guidewire and Sapiens can respond.

Villeneuve's dig at the industry is also a dig at his largest competitors: "Most AI solutions in insurance today are bolted on top of legacy core systems as loosely coupled tools." Guidewire and Sapiens are the obvious targets. Both have spent the past two years adding generative AI features to platforms that were not designed for it. BriteCore's argument is that you cannot govern agents you built on top of a system; you can only govern agents built into it.

The architecture distinction is real. BriteCore built its entire platform in Python from inception, with an API-first design. The company argues this makes agent integration native rather than bolted-on. Duck Creek makes a similar architectural argument. Guidewire, Sapiens, and the legacy core vendors are retrofitting AI onto platforms designed in the Java and COBOL era.

BriteCore's three-pillar strategy is a roadmap, not a product. The eight copilots launching now are the first wave: Submission Intake, Policy Summary, Claims Summary, Invoice Explanation, Document and Forms, Rate Change, Rules Intelligence, and Report. The company says future phases will introduce multi-agent orchestration across renewals, premium-to-cash, and customer interaction management. It will also support the emerging A2A (agent-to-agent) communication standard.

The governance layer is the part every insurance technology buyer will want to scrutinize closely. BriteCore's MCP service layer handles authentication, fine-grained access control, rate limiting, auditability, compliance controls, and human-in-the-loop governance across every AI interaction. An LLM provider layer sits separately, governing how the platform accesses frontier models including Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, with model flexibility to add open-source and specialist models as they mature.

Great Bay Insurance CEO Tim Byrne offered the only named customer quote in the announcement, calling BriteCore's approach impressive and noting his teams have found the Report Copilot useful. That is one reference for a platform serving more than 100 insurers across North America. BriteCore has not disclosed how many carriers have the new copilots live versus in pilot.

Duck Creek processes more than $150 billion in premium annually through its platform and serves 370 customers globally, including 33 of the top 50 North American insurers. BriteCore's footprint is smaller but its agentic architecture pitch is more explicit. The question for carriers evaluating both is whether BriteCore's Python-native advantage is structural or whether Duck Creek's scale and customer base can close any gap quickly.

The Celent analyst quote in the BriteCore press release comes from Karlyn Carnahan, Head of North America Insurance at Celent. The quote is adapted from a February 2026 panel she participated in on broader insurance AI trends — it is not a new BriteCore-specific analysis. Carnahan's broader Celent work is worth reading for context on where the insurance AI market actually stands, but readers should know the endorsement is from generalized remarks rather than commissioned research.

The 80 to 90 percent reduction in manual intake work cited for the Submission Intake Copilot is BriteCore's own number with no independent methodology disclosed. It is a plausible outcome for automating unstructured submission processing. It is not a verified benchmark.

The competitive window is narrow. If cloud-native platforms like BriteCore and Duck Creek establish themselves as the agentic operating system for insurance, legacy vendors become the infrastructure you bolt onto the platform rather than the platform itself. That is a forced modernization event for every carrier running Guidewire or Sapiens core that wants to stay current with AI. The next 18 months will determine whether the split becomes permanent.