Vertafore Innovation & Technology Culture

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

Innovation isn’t just about big breakthrough ideas; it’s about continuously improving the way we work and the experience we deliver to our customers. We celebrate our teams with the Vertafore Way, key elements of which are a “Bias to Action,” “Show up Curious” and “Customer Success is our Success,” which each help drive innovation of our own processes (How can we be more efficient for our customers?) and in the software that we deliver to our customers (How can we help them drive their velocity?)

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

It’s hard to pick just one. We have so many exciting projects that we are working on for our team members and our clients. One standout has been our implementation of AI capabilities for our development teams. It significantly speeds up their development of new ideas, reduces the turn around time on concepts, and significantly increases our ability to experiment.

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

Everything at Vertafore is delivered with a quality-first mindset. Our customers rely on Vertafore solutions to run their businesses so we can’t be showing up with failing software. That being said, we have opened up avenues for experimentation by building an architecture that protects our core while allowing for experiments on top. We work through these experiments in partnership with our customers to ensure we are delivering real value that can be implemented back into our core operations.

What tools support your day-to-day work?

GitHub Copilot and Claude Code have become a critical part of how my team operates day to day. These AI-assisted tools support everything from brainstorming solutions and scaffolding code to reviewing logic and accelerating repetitive development tasks. Work that once required hours of research or multiple rounds of iteration can now get started in minutes, allowing engineers to spend more time solving complex problems and less time on administrative overhead. They’ve fundamentally changed the pace and rhythm of how we build software.

How does your team experiment?

We have a culture where experimentation isn’t just encouraged — it’s expected. One of the principles we operate by is leaving the code better than we found it. Whether that’s refactoring a function, adopting a new pattern or evaluating a tool that could improve efficiency, team members are empowered to test ideas and share what they learn. That mindset helps us continuously improve our systems and processes rather than simply maintain them.

“One of the principles we operate by is leaving the code better than we found it.”

How does Vertafore adapt to change? 

The rise of AI is probably the best example I can point to. When these tools started gaining traction, we didn’t wait for a formal directive to explore their potential. Instead, we began experimenting and finding practical ways to apply them to real engineering challenges.

One of the most impactful examples was a major database consolidation effort. We used AI-assisted development tools to help create scripts that merged three separate databases into a single environment while preserving schemas and maintaining backward compatibility. We also used AI to help build a framework that could dynamically update SQL references to the correct schema, minimizing changes to the existing codebase.

AI didn’t make the technical decisions for us, but it accelerated research, prototyping and implementation. We’ve seen similar benefits when adding Microsoft Graph Outlook API support, resolving memory leaks and investigating performance issues. In each case, AI helped our engineers move from uncertainty to actionable solutions faster while still relying on human expertise and judgment.