As Bill Hartnett, director of U.S. insurance solutions for Microsoft Corp., describes it, there is a tidal wave coming–80 million consumers and employees whom the insurance industry will have to engage as the people who buy their products and run their operations in the very near future. "Boards [of directors] are starting to look at it as a crisis," he says. "How are they going to attract the right employees and compete in the marketplace where expectations are being set by other firms?"

Millennials are the first generation arriving in the workplace with prior experience with technology, notes consultant and author (Generation Blend) Rob Salkowitz. "Boomers and Gen X typically learned to use workplace technology at work and didn't come into the environment with a lot of expectations about what it could and should do," he says. "That's changed in the last 10 years as a generation that grew up with the Internet and mobile devices also saw how useful and innovative these services could be on the Web for doing important activities. You run the risk of having for the first time a group coming in that is more sophisticated than the IT decision-makers."

The history of insurance always has been built around affinity groups–people who share the same risks, explains David Piesse, global head of insurance for Sun Microsystems. "With social networking, we're looking at the rise of some massive affinity markets: the underbanked, underinsured, the Muslim population around the world, and Gen Y–younger people who look at life differently," he says.