If you’ve ever been involved in bringing a new insurance product to market, you’ve likely seen this before: It starts with a great idea, and pricing gets modeled in Excel within days.
But once it’s time to turn that spreadsheet into something usable – like a digital quote tool, agent dashboard, or back-end system logic – everything slows down.
Suddenly, you’re stuck in a back-and forth, translating formula requirements and issuing dev tickets. A process that should take days can easily stretch into weeks or months.
By the time it’s live, the market has often moved on.
It doesn’t have to be this hard.
Insurers today are speeding up their product development lifecycle following a simple workflow: Excel → Spark → AI.
1. Excel remains the center of product logic
Most insurance product logic starts – and lives – in Excel. Actuaries and product owners use it to build, price, and test new offerings. It’s familiar. It’s powerful. And it can be incredibly flexible.
But Excel files alone aren’t deployable. Once it's time to take spreadsheet logic and actually bring it into digital tools or systems, things get complicated.
In between the world of actuaries and development teams is a translation gap that slows everything down.
So, what if your Excel model didn’t need to be translated at all? What if your complex product spreadsheets could become the code?
2. Coherent Spark turns your spreadsheets into system-ready APIs
Using Coherent Spark, you can instantly turn your Excel file into a working API. That API retains all of your model’s logic – calculations, rules, and configurations – ready to plug into any system or app.
Need to make a change? Just update your Excel file and re-upload. The API refreshes automatically. No coding. No dev backlog.
In other words, your spreadsheet is no longer a static file. It becomes something dynamic, functional, and deployable.
For actuaries, this means full control over your product logic. You can keep working in Excel, make updates anytime, and see them reflected in real-time. No delays or miscommunication. Just a faster, more direct way to bring products to market.
3. AI developer tools help you build applications fast
With Coherent Spark, your Excel logic becomes an API – ready to power any system. But to get that logic into end users’ hands, you still need a user interface (UI).
This is where modern AI developer tools come in.
These tools can automatically generate interactive web applications from API documentation – giving you an instant, functional front-end experience.
Let’s say you want to build a digital quote tool for your distributor partners:
- Upload your spreadsheet to Spark. It becomes a system-ready API.
- Download the Swagger file. This file describes your API’s structure and endpoints – like an instruction manual for any system or AI to interact with.
- Open an AI dev tool like Replit. Prompt the AI to create a web-based quote tool using the Swagger file.
- Refine the UI. You can tweak labels, branding, and layout – but the core logic is already wired up.
- Deploy. Your quote tool is live, powered entirely by your Excel model and built without writing code from scratch.
In the past, getting to even a prototype would have required business analysts, developers, designers, and weeks of manual effort. Now, tools like Bolt, Replit, Lovable, and v0 – building on platforms like Cursor and Manus – make it possible to build and launch front-end apps simply by having a conversation.
The result? A working, AI-generated UI, directly connected to your product logic, that shortens the entire development lifecycle.
See the end-to-end process and get the exact prompt our team used to quickly build an underwriting app here:
Faster launches. More control. Less friction.
When your product logic lives in Excel, Coherent Spark makes it usable - turning it into a scalable, system-ready API. That API becomes the foundation AI tools use to help you build instant front-end experiences that bring your logic to market.
Your Excel model becomes the single source of truth – governing logic, powering deployment, and scaling with every iteration.
Frictionless for developers. Full control for business teams.
It’s a smarter, more agile way to build and launch insurance products.
