View this article online: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2025/10/29/333765.htm
Editor’s note: Take a minute to take our short poll a few paragraphs down to tell us what’s happening in the claims field. Is your job being replaced? Are things getting better with AI or worse? How do you feel about your profession right now?
When Gregg Golson recently shared a job posting for a claims investigator on LinkedIn, the overwhelming response to the post was further evidence of an ongoing shift he’s been watching unfold in the claims profession.
Within a few days of the post, some 800 people had applied for an adjusting job likely paying not much north of $70,000 per year.
A clear explanation for what he’s been seeing may seem obvious, but in truth, interest in and pay for entry-level claims positions is being affected by more than one factor. Artificial intelligence, being used more for simple tasks that were previously the purview of newer claims professionals, is the clearest culprit. The streamlining technology promises change across claims positions lower and upper level, and the industry at large.
However, Golson, chief strategist for Up2Now LLC, a consulting firm, believes there’s a lot more to it than that.
One factor impacting claims hiring may be catastrophes. While catastrophes are up, the number of claims are down. Many recent catastrophes have produced massive losses, but they also produced fewer total claims—or the brunt of the claims were total losses paid out with little required adjustment work.
“We have not had a landfall from a hurricane in 2025 (in the U.S.), so far,” Golson said. “The past few hurricanes, while causing a lot of damage, had a large percentage of claims under hurricane deductibles, or were only flood damage with no flood coverage.”
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A bigger impact on the claims profession may be driven by the way carriers have lately been running their claims operations. Insurance companies are streamlining claims, and they are looking at loss adjustment expenses with a sharper eye. More carriers are opting to have field adjusters take photographs, measurements and then report damage for desk adjusters to take over and write the claim, Golson noted.
“Carriers are moving away from full inspections by independent adjusters,” he said.
Of course, AI is facilitating some of this streamlining, he added.
Ugly Cycle
Tim Parker has been in the business more than 30 years. Parker, who also has a podcast, The Adjuster’s Diaries, in which he talks about trends and gives observations on the state of the industry, has seen a number of these “cycles” play out. He also has his own story from the perspective of a policyholder with a claim dealing with a series of adjusters coming to his home who were unqualified—including one who had recently been “flipping burgers,” which ended in a dispute with his carrier—which he believes illustrates the trend as well as some glaring concerns about the changes taking place.
“About every seven to 10 years, we see a huge influx of brand-new adjusters who are in the marketplace who are willing to take the job for pennies on the dollar,” Parker said. “They really drive down, not only the quality of the of the work that we see, but also they bring forth another wave of public adjusters that come in…that really begin to affect the marketplace in general.”
The impact on the marketplace is compounded by a “knee jerk reaction” in which Parker has seen carriers, in an effort to avoid dealing with a plethora of new adjusters, cut lose independent adjusting firms and take on as much work as possible internally. In turn, independent adjusting firms begin to focus on catastrophe work because that’s all the business they can get. That then sets off a pricing battle between adjusters working for carriers and independent adjusters in which novice adjusters head to independent adjuster firms for more money and the chance to work on catastrophes.
“Then we have those same green adjusters, instead of doing the daily claims that they can learn on, now they’re involved in cat because of an industry shift, and then we see companies…that are mid-sized IA firms that will begin taking on brand-new adjusters and they’ll have them do any loss no matter the size…for a flat rate of $125 to $150 per claim. And those green adjusters will drive that dollar amount,” Parker said.
To avoid the chaos, experienced adjusters like him who have been in the business for a long time will step away and wait for the market to calm down. The effect isn’t good for new adjusters or seasoned professionals.
“The (entry) level people either get their butts fired or move on or move up,” Parker said. “It’s a lot like flooding the market with new cars. It’s just continually just filling the market with new cars and then before you know it, those prices just drop incredibly because of the amount of new cars that are out there, and the same thing holds true with us.”
Claims Execs And Brain Drain
Sharon Emek, CEO of the talent placement firm WAHVE (Work At Home Vintage Experts), is seeing a trend that at first glance seems to point for toward a favorable market for job seekers: a lack of professionals.
However, the professionals she helps place have a great deal of experience.
“I’m seeing requests for claims,” Emek said. “A lot of the carriers I work with, TPA’s and a lot of others, they want very specialized claims (professionals), like claims litigation, senior casualty litigation, high-end property, senior claims examiners, and they’re asking for (people experienced adjusting) cats.”
She is seeing more experienced claims adjusters, those with managing and teaching experience, age out, and then there aren’t enough young professionals coming in who have the knowledge needed to do the job at a high level.
“The industry is facing a somewhat of a brain drain,” Emek said.
The increased implementation of AI has replaced the need for some basic tasks performed by entry level workers, but that is also creating a problem, she said.
“Here’s the rub with that,” Emek said. “So, the lower level roles are being taken over by AI, and the problem is how are they going to train (newer claims professionals) to become experienced in the higher level, and then with these higher level people retiring, how are we going to fill that talent pool, because AI can’t take over all of the adjustments.”
A Roof Tale
Parker has seen the changes happening now in the profession impact him as a policyholder filling a claim.
The Texas resident had a loss during the active 2024 hurricane season, which included roof damage, the loss of a shed in his backyard and the destruction of some siding.
“The person my insurance company sends to me was flipping patties six months earlier,” said Parker, who described the man as weighing 250 to 280 pounds, which he said was “too heavy to get up on my roof.”
He sent the adjuster home without the man getting up on the roof to survey the damage, and he called the carrier and asked them to send somebody more experienced and qualified to examine his home.
“Well, the next person they sent to my home had been a barista three or four months earlier, still no experience in the industry, and yet they were a licensed adjuster,” Parker said.
He was troubled that the adjuster had handled only “a handful of claims,” yet they were already adjusting losses in a catastrophe. That person also left without doing the work.
The third person the carrier sent made it up to Parker’s roof, and began speaking to someone on his cellphone, asking some basic questions.
“When he got off my roof I said, ‘Can you tell me anything?’ He said ‘No, I can’t, I’m going to have to send it to a desk adjuster because I don’t know what I’m doing,'” Parker said.
The adjuster and carrier returned to Parker with a loss of roughly $6,000. With his deductible factored in, Parker had roughly $2,000 coming his way to make him whole.
“I got my own adjuster and took it to appraisal, and the insurance company wound up paying $78,000 and some change,” Parker said. “It was way off the mark. The insurance company frustrated me to the point of almost being crazy, even though they knew who I was, knew my experience level, and all these other things, but they were willing to do that.”