Automate, but at what cost?

I am a Product Manager at Seyna, where I am responsible for designing and managing the tech products that enable our business experts to operate our insurance products seamlessly.

My job is to understand where the bottlenecks are, decide what to build, and coordinate a team of senior engineers to turn it all into reality.

In the insurance sector, automation is a key lever: it saves time, makes operations more reliable and allows us to better serve our partners: brokers and reinsurers.

And this is still at the heart of my mission today: identifying what can be simplified, industrialised and automated in order to move faster and do better.

But as I continue to implement automation, I am beginning to see another side to the issue. Less visible. Less quantifiable. And yet very real.

It is this side that I wanted to explore here.

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1. Automation, the promise of liberation

Automation has always been a positive reflex for me.

It makes things faster, more reliable, and less repetitive. It frees up time to focus on what really matters.

When you receive dozens of bordereaux from brokers, or have to produce reinsurance accounts every month, you immediately see the value of not having to do everything by hand.

At Seyna, this reflex has allowed us to move forward quickly and lighten certain loads.

But as we increase automation, we also discover that every productivity gain has a hidden cost.

And that the feelings of the teams evolve more subtly than the numbers.

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2. Well-honed scripts, faster teams

In just a few months, we automated several repetitive tasks that took up a lot of our time and required technical expertise within the team:

• Product performance tracking charts, which the actuarial and CSM teams use each month to prepare for their steering committee meetings, replacing numerous ad hoc studies in disparate Excel workbooks.
• The calculation of loss triangles and IBNR estimates, which enable the cost of claims not yet reported to be anticipated. We have equipped their production to make it more fluid, more frequent, and better shared.
• Reinsurance statements, sent monthly to reinsurers to justify our commitments. Before: lots of manual copying and pasting from the accounts. Now: a system that automatically generates the right files with the right data.
• The transformation of incoming data, i.e. the conversion from a ‘broker’ format to a standardised format used in our platform. Transformation rules are now generated automatically, based on declarative configurations.
  

In each case, the benefit is clear: less time spent handling files, more bandwidth for analysing, deciding and moving forward.

On paper, it's a success.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” - Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

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3. Save time, lose a little breath

But behind the time savings and efficiency, I also see a kind of fatigue.

The days are busier, the topics more varied and complex. The pace is accelerating, and with it, the feeling of having less mental space. There are fewer simple victories, too.

And then there is a more personal question: that of legitimacy.

When everything becomes “automatic”, what remains of the profession?‍
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Instead of a visible, recognised professional act, sometimes all that remains is a button clicked or a script launched.

It's a paradox that isn't often discussed: we produce more, but sometimes feel less useful.

"I sometimes ask myself: if I were an actuary today, would I still feel as fulfilled in my role?" - Jean-Baptiste, Product Manager

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4. Do better, without forgetting why you are doing it

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom.

Internally, knowledge is shared more effectively. Concepts that were long confined to actuarial teams (such as acquisition or IBNR) are now understood, at least in broad terms, by many other profiles within the team.

Above all, automation enables us to serve those who matter more quickly and with greater transparency:

• Brokers, who need reliable tools to manage their portfolios.
• Reinsurers, to whom we send accurate and reliable accounts every month.
• And, by extension, policyholders, who benefit from better-managed products.

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Conclusion

All this is no small matter.

But it is a balancing act.

Because when we automate, we make choices.

We decide what still deserves a human eye or touch.

We decide what can be made invisible, what we consider ‘a given’ or ‘reliable’.

And sometimes, in doing so, we erase knowledge without realising it.

Implicit reasoning, professional intuition, a moment of exchange.

Automating also means choosing what we are willing to forget.