CDL accelerates its agentic AI roadmap with cost and performance insights from Dynatrace

CDL serves as the veins of the UK’s personal lines insurance market, powering around 60% of its transactions through aggregators and brokers. These providers rely on CDL’s platform to build their own digital services, including the websites and apps where consumers interact. In a crowded and competitive market, slow response times can lead to missed revenue opportunities for insurance providers, so it’s essential that CDL delivers a fast, reliable user experience on its platform.

To further differentiate, CDL is working to integrate its services with AI agents to automate core insurance processes and enable customers to interact with providers in a more frictionless way. To begin with, it enables customers to complete simple policy management tasks such as updating their contact details, opting out of marketing communications, or accessing their documents through AI agents. In future, these capabilities will be enhanced to allow customers to turn to AI agents to complete mid-term adjustments and renewals, or take out a new policy in moments.

The engine room at the heart of CDL’s AI vision is built on multiple AWS services, including API Gateway, Lambda, and Bedrock. Its technology team knew that trust and transparency would be critical to adoption of its new AI capabilities, and it would be essential to maintain visibility into the token consumption and costs of LLMs. Observability was therefore a prerequisite to success. CDL was already using Dynatrace to offer a single source of truth across its technology stack. The platform’s AI observability capabilities and strategic partnership with AWS made it the natural solution.

“AWS gives us the capability to use AI, and Dynatrace gives us the confidence,” said Matt Eisengruber, Head of Architecture at CDL. “With the AI observability Dynatrace provides, we were able to accelerate our roadmap significantly. It eliminated the guesswork, allowing us to get our AI agents to market faster. We just needed to drop in the Dynatrace SDK and had instant visibility into Bedrock. When it comes to large transformational changes like AI, Dynatrace is a critical enabler to rolling it out to the enterprise at scale.”

• Full control: Dynatrace’s support for OpenLLMetry enables CDL to maintain visibility into Amazon Bedrock with minimal effort, so its teams can observe the journey from user prompt to AI output. This gives CDL’s governance teams unparalleled insight, creating trust and transparency for regulatory and customer needs, as well as optimizing the costs of LLM consumption. For example, CDL identified an outdated version of Anthropic was leading to token exhaustion, which it was able to solve easily by updating the model.
• Improved satisfaction: CDL uses Dynatrace to track key metrics such as Apdex, which allow it to better understand the impact of its services on consumer behavior. This helps its teams to maintain visibility into the experience of its customers' customers, to ensure that its services are delivering the best possible outcomes. As a result, CDL improved its CSAT scores by 10%.
• Reduced costs: In addition to optimizing the costs of LLM usage, Dynatrace has enabled CDL to consolidate its previously fragmented toolchain to a single, unified platform. CDL has gone from 10 observability solutions to just one, driving a significant licensing consolidation, as well as reducing the time it takes to onboard new team members from days to minutes.
• Faster resolution: Dynatrace allows CDL to combine metrics, logs, and traces in one platform, creating a single source of truth that its teams can use to get to the bottom of almost any issue quickly and easily. As a result, they can focus their efforts on resolving problems before users are impacted, delivering better insurance experiences to end customers.

“Dynatrace changed the game for CDL,” said Chris Buckley, Head of Operations at CDL. “With the insurance ecosystem being so interconnected, when someone had an issue, it used to take time to identify who and where. Now, Dynatrace has simplified that ecosystem, allowing us to go from being reactive to proactively resolving issues before they impact our customers. With Dynatrace, we have a single source of truth that ultimately enables us to focus on the things that matter, helping our customers to deliver better insurance journeys for their own customers.”