(Image credit: derwiki:Pixabay.)
It’s not often that Mike Dwyer, co-founder and CTO of EIS (San Francisco), sits for a detailed interview. As one of the company’s original architects and its longtime technology leader, he has largely let others represent the firm publicly. But with the recent introduction of CoreGentic, an AI and agentic orchestration layer for EIS’s OneSuite platform, this seemed like the right moment to revisit EIS—not as a legacy vendor, but as an influential technologist’s long game coming into focus.
“Legacy systems make change slow, costly, and risky,” Dwyer said at the time of the CoreGentic announcement. “By embedding AI, agentic orchestration, and a domain knowledge base at the core, insurers can make safe changes in days rather than months.”
That statement encapsulates what EIS has been building toward for over a decade: the ability to configure and adapt core systems as fluidly as modern e-commerce platforms.
A Platform Built Ahead of Its Time
Mike Dwyer, Co-Founder and CTO, EIS.
From its founding, EIS took a customer-centric rather than product-centric approach to core systems. Dwyer and co-founder Alec Miloslavsky envisioned a platform that could serve any insurance line—property/casualty, life, accident and health, or employee benefits—through any channel. “We wanted insurers to function more like Amazon or Netflix,” Dwyer explains, “able to scale and distribute products seamlessly, in whatever way customers choose to engage.”
EIS’s differentiation was always architectural. Long before “API-first” became standard, the company designed its platform around open standards, microservices, and data fluidity. When the industry was still debating whether to trust the cloud, EIS was already evolving toward cloud-native architecture.
That commitment led EIS to adopt and promote the MACH principles—Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless—now a hallmark of its competitive positioning. Dwyer describes MACH certification as “a bar that not everyone can clear,” since it requires peer review and technical validation rather than marketing claims.
From Core Systems to Intelligent Orchestration
The CoreGentic announcement in early October marked a natural next step in that progression. It embeds AI directly into the core platform, automating workflows and allowing business analysts to deploy product changes in days, not months. CoreGentic combines generative and agentic AI with a domain knowledge base and human oversight, ensuring that speed does not come at the expense of compliance.
With thousands of APIs exposed through its Digital Experience Platform, EIS can now deliver out-of-the-box “agents” capable of executing business processes through conversational interfaces rather than configuration screens. Dwyer calls it the next stage beyond low/no-code: “We’re moving from configuration to true conversation. You tell the system what you want, and it interprets that into executable processes.”
This approach also enables governance and transparency—a crucial concern as insurers explore AI-driven automation. “It’s powerful, but you still need oversight,” Dwyer emphasizes. “We’ve built controls so that everything remains auditable and compliant.”
EIS has been testing the waters for years. Its 2022 acquisition of technology from Metromile (following that company’s acquisition by Lemonade) added machine-learning capabilities for fraud detection. Since then, the company has been refining how to embed AI into business processes—from configuration assistance and underwriting to billing and claims management.
A Veteran Player Reasserts Its Relevance
As insurers cautiously experiment with AI, Dwyer sees them tackling the low-hanging fruit first: internal efficiencies and IT operations. But he believes that once trust and governance frameworks mature, the transformation will accelerate dramatically. “Once carriers see what’s possible,” he says, “they won’t go back to traditional cycles of design, code, test, and deploy.”
EIS’s dual strength—technical credibility and broad functional coverage across P&C, life, and benefits—positions it as a serious contender in the new AI-enabled landscape. The company’s CoreGentic layer turns what was once an architectural advantage into a strategic differentiator: an open, composable foundation now infused with automation and intelligence.
As the industry gathers in mid-October, Dwyer’s voice adds depth to the ongoing discussion about where core systems go next. “Insurance is process-centric,” he says. “We’ve moved from code orchestration, to low-code, and now to human interaction orchestration—conversational orchestration. That’s the shift. And it’s a game changer.”
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