Scout InsurTech Spotlight with Grace Hanson

Grace Hanson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elysian, an AI-native TPA providing end-to-end handling of commercial liability and property claims, as well as qualitative ground-up claims reviews across all lines of business. Grace was interviewed by Andrew Daniels, Co-Founder at Scout InsurTech and Co-Founder and President at Crashbay.

Grace, you’ve built an impressive career in claims and insurance innovation. How has that journey shaped your perspective, and what led you to Elysian?

“I started my career at AIG during the transition from paper files to digital files. Back then, people literally wheeled carts of files to adjusters on diary dates. Digitization removed the carts, but not the complexity. Suddenly adjusters were logging into systems with endless document lists, still doing all the hard work of structuring, contextualizing, and interpreting information themselves.

Over time, I saw that most technology in the space solved narrow pain points, but no one was tackling the hardest part of the problem: helping adjusters actually make sense of raw, unstructured information. Fewer than 15% of claims can be fully automated, yet much of the market was chasing that slice. That realization led to Elysian. We wanted to build technology designed for adjusters’ real workflows, and to prove it we knew we had to handle claims ourselves. That combination of tech and service is the foundation of Elysian.”

Commercial claims are notoriously complex. What’s happening in that space right now that makes it such a big opportunity for innovation?

“Complexity is exactly why it’s been overlooked. Most companies focus on the easy 15%, the low-value, low-complexity claims, because they’re more straightforward to automate. But the real pain is in the complex commercial space, where ambiguity reigns.

Think about general liability or specialty lines: outcomes hinge on uncertain jury verdicts, evolving legal standards, and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes. Solving those problems requires more than detection. It’s about execution and decision-making. That’s where we believe Elysian can deliver real value: not just efficiency, which has become table stakes, but improved outcomes and better pricing for consumers.”

Much of claims technology has been designed to replace human involvement. You’ve talked about supporting, not eliminating, adjusters. How do you think about striking that balance?

“It’s naïve to think you can fully automate human complexity, especially when you’re dealing with claimants, litigators, and customers. Instead, we approached our technology by mapping it to the mental model of an adjuster.

The key challenge is contextualization: taking raw documents and information and making them usable. Our AI is built around that task, informed by subject matter experts who know what adjusters actually need to do. The result is a “claim brain,” a proprietary knowledge base that blends human expertise with AI. That symbiotic relationship allows humans and technology to work hand in hand, not in competition.”

One of the challenges in claims is building deep expertise across so many areas. How can technology help an adjuster access the wisdom of a 20-year veteran more quickly?

“That’s exactly what our knowledge base is designed to do. We’ve curated it with input from adjusters with decades of experience, embedding their insights directly into the system.

When a newer adjuster comes onboard, the AI guides them through complex claims they might not otherwise be able to handle alone. Instead of relying solely on years of trial and error, they gain access to institutional knowledge instantly. It’s about lifting the entire team’s capabilities, not just automating tasks.”

Looking ahead, what do you think will be the biggest disruptors or shake-ups in the claims space over the next few years?

“I think the real disruption will come from how people learn to work with AI, not from AI itself. The models will get faster and cheaper, but the real differentiator will be in how effectively organizations apply them.

As my CTO likes to say, AI today is like a semantic zip of the internet. It gives you the average. But if you know how to frame the problem and direct the technology, you can elevate that average into something exceptional. That skill, extracting the best from AI, is going to define the next wave of leaders in claims.

At Elysian, that’s what we’re building for: technology and people working together to deliver outcomes that neither could achieve alone.”

Scout InsurTech Thanks Its Presenting Partner

And Our Scout InsurTech Partners