Allstate has opened a 33,000-square-foot claims training campus in Dallas where adjusters train on damaged vehicles hands-on, including instruction on advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).
The auto lab at Allstate Claims University holds nearly 30 electric, hybrid, and conventional vehicles, selected using more than 3.5 million claims data points and meant to represent both common and complex damage. Training covers collision, flood, hail, and structural damage, and repairs involving airbags, cameras, sensors, and ADAS.
"Hands-on access to diagnostic tools and repair demonstrations helps them understand how new vehicle technology can affect damage assessments and repair decisions," the company said. The campus supports roughly 23,000 Allstate claims professionals, who handle about 8.5 million claims a year.
"When someone's home is damaged by a storm or their vehicle is involved in an accident, they need more than a claim processed: they need an expert," Mike Fiato, Allstate executive vice president and chief claims officer, said in a statement.
Calibrations and scans keep climbing
The training arrives as the systems it covers turn up on a growing share of estimates. CCC's Crash Course 2026 report put calibrations on 28.3% of repairable appraisals in 2025, up from 21.8% the year before, which CCC characterized as a 30% increase in the number of appraisals carrying one.
Capture lags at the initial estimate. Just 48.5% of calibrations appear on initial estimates, with 51.5% turning up on supplements, according to CCC's Q4 2025 data. Diagnostic scans reached 87.7% of DRP estimates, with 92.1% of those captured on the initial estimate.
Adjusters write fewer of the estimates
Insurance adjusters wrote more than 40% of initial estimates on repairable vehicles in 2017. By early 2024 that had fallen to 18%, a drop of more than half, according to CCC data presented at the 2024 MSO Symposium. Shops, meanwhile, prepared more than 45% of initial direct repair estimates.
Allstate moved early in that shift. The carrier closed a number of drive-in claim offices in 2017 and took a $52 million restructuring charge, and then-president Matt Winter told investors that roughly half of all drivable vehicles were being inspected through its QuickFoto Claim method by the second quarter of that year. Photo inspection "led to a reduced need for field adjusters since we took a lot of that inefficiency out of the systems," Winter said, adding that claim cycle time had fallen from five to seven days to 24 hours.
Whatever the training changes on the carrier side, the initial estimate on direct repair work is increasingly written in the shop, while over half of calibrations arrive in supplements.
