The insurance adjuster’s role had been greatly diminished. During her father’s time, setting a value for a claim had been a skill. Under Allstate’s new system, the computer would spit out an estimate. This was Colossus, a program that analyzed hundreds of different injuries entered by adjusters like her. As Brady soon learned, Colossus had been tweaked to lowball claims amounts. It was then her job to persuade the policyholder to accept a claim even lower than the one disgorged by Colossus.

Mark Romano, one of the people responsible for tweaking Colossus so that it favored the insurer, worked out of Allstate’s headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois. “I could turn the knob, so to speak, and increase the values of cases, or I could turn the knob down and decrease the value,” he said.

When payout data indicated something was amiss, Romano took to the road to find out what was going on. He and his colleagues discovered that adjusters were entering an unusual amount of herniated disk injuries into Colossus, a far more valuable claim than a “soft tissue” claim like whiplash. Romano was told to “calibrate” the claims teams across the country, telling them to reduce the number of herniated disk claims “regardless if a neurologist or an orthopedic surgeon or a radiologist or whomever said it was a herniated disk.”