Making Friends with the Future: Agency Tech Moving at a Faster Pace than Ever Before
That used to be one of my biggest beefs as an agency owner — I have all of these pieces of tech and none of them talked to each other,” Vonda Copeland, co-owner and vice president of operations at Copeland Insurance Agency in Manhattan, Kansas, told Insurance Journal. “None of them were integrated, or the ones that did integrate with certain management systems or CRMs, were very limited.”
Copeland was not alone in being frustrated with the lack of connectivity across agency technologies. But she’s also not alone in feeling like things are getting better.
“I see that the tech is starting to open a bit more,” she said. “Insurance carriers and third-party tech providers are starting to play well with others a little better than they used to because that’s really what we need them to do — we need them to be able to talk to each other,” adds Copeland, who also serves as the executive committee secretary and assistant treasurer of the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents.
Technological innovation is accelerating and connectivity in particular is changing, according to some in the industry, although others still think there is a long way to go when it comes to getting various pieces of technology to connect or work well together.
Copeland says one driver for better connectivity between agency tech stacks has been agency owners themselves. “Some pretty savvy agency owners have said, ‘Well, if this doesn’t talk to each other, then I’m going to get another piece of technology that does or I’m going to build my own integration,'” Copeland says. “And I have seen that happen over and over again.”
Others note that artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a positive role when it comes to customer service, data management and other areas.
Brendan Mulcahy, SIAA’s vice president, technology and innovation partnerships, is among those who thinks there is still more to be done. “The honest answer is there are still a lot of systems that don’t talk to each other,” Mulcahy told Insurance Journal. That includes even some of the “basic stuff” in agency tech, he added.
When systems do not connect, the agency is stuck with the burdensome process of manually keeping up with the same information in two places.
“For example, if you use a marketing platform for your prospecting and your outreach, and you use a management system for policy storage and so on, is the information in sync? If you have, for example, a producer working in one and then a CSR working in the other, are they working from the same information? That’s still a challenge,” Mulcahy said.
While some vendors are providing better connectivity options than others, it is often still the case that different systems solving different problems are competing, he said.
“So, those opposing systems don’t always talk well to each other,” he said. “Unfortunately, integration and connectivity, while making progress, and definitely getting better, there’s still room for improvement.”
Chris Cline, executive director of the Agents Council for Technology and author of “The Inertia of Legacy,” agrees that efficiency and connectivity continue to be huge when discussing agency technology today. But he says while there’s still frustrations among agency owners and their technology providers, connections are getting better.
“There are definitely frustrations in the industry today, and opportunities, to get better, quicker, faster and talk about how we can better leverage data and connectivity,” Cline said. But the industry continues to “chip away” at improving connectivity and efficiency through technology improvements, he added.
One challenge to improving connectivity is that agencies are “still living in a world where data is inconsistent,” Cline said. “It’s not housed necessarily in single systems so it lives in disparate worlds where it might not be [stored in] the same way.” So, creating better standards for data is still a huge opportunity to solve, he added.
“Carriers, customers and everybody consume and share data differently so the question remains, how can agencies efficiently get that data into management systems for things like PDFs and spreadsheets or handwritten forms?” Cline asked. “It’s been a real pain point over the years,” he added.
The good news is that now the industry is beginning to see some solutions emerge that can help agencies consume these “flat, editable freeform data transfers across producer applications,” he said. “From my observations, we are starting to see conversations even if these aren’t the words people use, we’re starting to focus on really fundamental core processes rather than maybe just some of the shiny or more romantic things.”
AI Innovation Wave
AI innovators are opening new doors with expanded connectivity that links agency data and data from other sources into technologies helping to solve real agency problems.
“Third-party technology providers have recognized the needs in the insurance industry and are designing AI programs for these needs,” said Jessica Jung, president, Oswald Companies. “They understand that AI can enhance customer service through systems such as chatbots and virtual assistants.”
But it’s helping in other more sophisticated ways, too.
“Technology to help us mine and cultivate data will give industry professionals more time to focus on advising their clients to make informed decisions backed by actionable insights powered by accurate data,” Jung told Insurance Journal.
One AI analytics firm, DONNA ai (aureusanalytics.com/donna), provides insights for independent agencies about customers and their books of business by delivering “sentiment scores” for things like customer experience, account rounding, improving retention and even customer loyalty. Anurag Shah, CEO and co-founder of DONNA ai, says the platform can integrate with agency management system providers, CRMs and other external data providers to provide benchmarking tools agencies can use to compare their firms with others as well.
While AI is the new buzzword in agency tech, it’s not new — nor is it as important as the data itself, Shah says.
What makes AI work is the data and agencies have a lot of it.
“From my perspective, I mean whether it’s AI or not, if it has business value, then it’s valuable.” For example, “if you are processing large volumes of data and finding patterns and insights and generating something valuable for the users, there is already some AI component in it,” Shah said.
What makes AI work is the data, and agencies have a lot of it.
“Artificial intelligence helps us analyze data faster, better understand and act on trends, and make risk financing decisions,” Jung said. “Technology has enabled the industry to collect much more data. The key is using it more strategically to drive quantifiable outcomes for clients. That’s where AI can help.”
A good example would be the use of client data across all areas of integrated risk to proactively reduce losses and a client’s overall cost of risk, Jung added.
Shah said DONNA has processed 60 million policy records, which indicates that the model works. However, it’s the amount of data that it has processed, and what has been learned from that data that is more relevant, he said.The data is probably more important than the model, but the combination is “really the magic,” he added.
A Digital Roundtrip
Elad Tsur, the chief AI officer of Applied Systems, joined Applied in July 2024 with the acquisition of Planck, a company that Tsur helped co-found in 2016. Planck is an AI-based data platform for commercial underwriting. “We started Planck with the belief that access to real-time data to get a full picture of a business is more crucial than ever when identifying the actual risk factors that are core to insurance,” Tsur said in statement in July.
Taylor Rhodes, CEO of Applied, has long believed there is enormous potential to apply AI capabilities throughout the insurance lifecycle, or the digital roundtrip of insurance as he often refers to the evolution of industry technology. “Intelligent automation can make better use of data,” he told Insurance Journal.
“There’s plenty of opportunities throughout that digital roundtrip of insurance for AI to create intelligent automation, understand what data is telling you at a certain point in a workflow, and assert insight or the appropriate level of understanding, knowledge or recognition of patterns at the point of new sale renewal, prospecting, underwriting advisory services, etc.”
While Planck’s AI-platform serves commercial carrier needs in underwriting, the technology behind Planck could also be applied to other products throughout Applied’s ecosystem, Rhodes told Insurance Journal in July.
“Planck brings a huge shot in the arm in terms of just pure capacity — our R&D capacity around AI,” he said. “We have a large portfolio of products that service the carrier side of the market, the agency side of the market, and we can take their AI expertise and the capabilities and the proprietary technology they’ve built and inject those into our product set.”
Tsur said the Planck AI platform continues to service commercial insurers through Applied’s IVANs arm but noted that the plan behind the acquisition into Applied is to build the AI technology out further. “We immediately saw it was just beginning to scratch the surface of what we can do together,” Tsur said. “We had a very successful product for the underwriting domain” but now want to bring that same technology and product to the distribution side.
Rhodes said in July: “We’ve got a product team focused in Ivans on the carrier side and a product team focused within Applied and EZLynx on the agency side. So now what we can do is take this platform, this AI technology capability and skillset, and we can work with our product leaders on both the agency and the carrier side simultaneously.”
Tsur said the team will add the same AI capabilities to Applied Epic in the first half of 2025 with the launch of the Applied Book Builder, which uses the power of AI to enrich commercial risk profiles based on thousands of publicly available sources. The AI tech aims to round out risk profiles and identify coverage gaps within existing policies, then deliver corresponding market placement insights to help teams submit business to appropriate carriers. Applied says that the new AI-integration will enable “insurance producers and account managers to target new commercial lines prospects and cross-sell and upsell opportunities.”
Tsur explained the platform will have five layers of AI that will provide knowledge and insights into business that will create what he calls “wisdom” or “underwriting insights” to make recommendations and ultimately deliver a “co-pilot” to help CSRs and producers. There may even one day be a sixth AI layer — a pilot, but Tsur says this is something that is still far away for the insurance industry. This would be the “full agent layer,” he said.
“We’re nowhere near that, at least not in the next, let’s say couple of years,” Tsur said.
For now, AI innovators in the insurance industry need to stay focused on data and commit to prioritizing data governance, says Tony Martinez, chief information officer, at Unison Risk Advisors. “It’s all about people, process and technology,” Martinez said. “Many think automation is scary. It isn’t. It frees up your thinkers and your resources to do what’s more important and takes some of the repetitive tasks away. It unlocks trapped capacity.”
To unlock that trapped capacity, agencies will need to invest in people first. “Business intelligence folks, people who have the ability to run a complex data analysis and make it simple for producers and principals to understand what they should do next strategically, people who can translate and speak to both the business and the technology side are going to become more and more in demand in the industry,” said Abrianne Harmon, director of innovation for Alkeme Insurance based in Ladera Ranch, California, which ranks 34th on Insurance Journal’s Top 100 Agencies list.
Technology should be able to help in an increasingly fast-paced and difficult insurance market like today, Harmon said. “It’s really burning our account managers on the backend, and I hope that using AI would give them a better quality of life, more comfort in the workplace,” she said.
“I hope to not see it start replacing people in the industry, and I don’t think it will,” she added.
Where AI can help the most will be to augment certain roles, not replace them, she said. “Areas that we need to focus on as producers and as operations people is not how AI can replace producers,” she said. “Brokers who want to do well will embrace AI for repetitive tasks but could also go even further onto the human side to help build relationships and help their clients grow organically,” she added.