Agency Tech: Building Bridges and Empowering People — How AI Is Impacting Workflows and Agencies

There never seems to be enough time in a day to get the things done that need to be done. That runs true for most people, in any industry, but for the insurance agency world it’s a daily reality.

Agencies are struggling, said Dave Rose, head of agency and embedded performance at bolt. The phone keeps ringing, customers get trapped in automated menus, and agency staff spend too much time routing calls instead of helping clients.

Rose said bolt Agency, the insurance agency powered by the bolt online insurance distribution platform, was in the same boat. The digital agency supported more than 20,000 insurance policies across the U.S. with a 30-person team, until they tried something new, an AI receptionist. In just six months, the AI receptionist was receiving about 90% of inbound calls, call-to-bind conversions doubled, IVR drop-offs were reduced by 32%, and agent talk time was cut by 36%.

“I’ve talked to many agents that say they struggle just even running new business because their team is so focused on servicing, and their staff is not getting to everything that they should be getting to,” Rose said.

This is exactly where new AI-driven technology is helping. It’s not replacing humans because humans still need to be in the loop, he said. “It’s augmenting some of the important tasks that maybe require repetitive data entry, and it’s letting the most important things get done by the experts that you have in your agency,” he said. The “real” people. “They’re best at being consultative, building relationships, coverage counseling, being experts–especially if you have more complex policyholders or policies.”

James Thom, chief product officer at Vertafore, oversees product management design for all the solutions that agency partners use, whether that’s an agency management system, rating products, workflow management tools, or CRM solutions. “I get to see the full gamut–everybody from a small mom-and-pop agency all the way up to the top 10 agencies that we work with,” he said.

The past two years have been an exciting time for product development. “Everybody’s chasing the opportunity that we see in the industry to really drive automation and efficiency with AI,” he said. “Over the past 12 months in particular, we’re starting to see the impact and benefits of AI.”

The most significant innovations for agencies have been in the back office and service workflows, he said. “So, a lot of the traditional manual tasks that get done inside of the agency–whether that’s reconciling cash receipts that are coming in, policy checking, doing quote reviews, doing quote comparisons, building proposals–all these things are becoming much, much easier and faster for folks, leading to higher quality and better service for the customer through the use of AI.”

Thom said that Vertafore has spent the last year focused on two primary tech development areas: building out its AI platform and partnering with different AI vendors so the tech stacks work more inter-operably within the agency management system, ultimately delivering to joint clients a more streamlined workflow.

AI is helping agencies reinvent processes that used to take 10, 15, or 20 steps, down to just a few, he said. From adding a new vehicle to a customer’s policy to helping accounting reconcile insurance carrier statements in the back-office processes. “That’s where we’re seeing a lot of value.”

Thom cautions that it’s critical to always keep a human in the loop even as the process for certain tasks becomes vastly more efficient.

“We understand that in a service transaction, in particular, the human touch as part of that process is super important to our clients,” he said. “So, this isn’t fully automating straight-through processing of these service requests. It’s trying to take the manual work off the user’s desk so that they can focus more on the client relationship, focus more on the advisory service part of the task and work through it,” Thom said.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating changes in insurance agency technology, making it easier to automate workflows, build new products, and connect systems that historically have struggled to communicate, according to Javier Hernandez, chief information officer, ISU Steadfast, the U.S.-based insurance agency network.

Hernandez pointed out companies such as Outmarket, which have developed specialized workflows for insurance agencies. “We’ve seen others, there’s new management systems coming out,” Hernandez said. “And I would say out of everything I’ve seen so far, that is probably the biggest shift.”

He said three developments have helped drive the transformation: the introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs), the ability of AI to understand and interact with different software systems, and the growing ease with which technology companies can create and test new products.

“Creation of product has become easier than before,” Hernandez said. “It doesn’t mean that all the products are good or they’ll make it, but you get to iterate quickly through your ideas.”

AI is also making automation more accessible. While automation technology itself is not new, Hernandez said the amount of technical work required to create automated workflows has declined considerably.

“AI is helping us build the tools to do the automation,” he said. Agentic AI takes that a step further by allowing systems to perform tasks based on broader instructions rather than requiring every individual action to be programmed in advance, he said.

“Agentic AI is knowledgeable enough that if you give the instructions, you don’t have to write every single step on how to do the work,” Hernandez said. “Just like a person will do it. You don’t need to babysit it as much. It can understand the context of what it’s seeing.”

As AI systems gain access to more information, Hernandez expects the role of insurance professionals to shift, as well.

“The more information is fed into them, the more that knowledge expands immensely to where it may know a lot more than many people,” he said. “I think as we develop more into the future, most people will be project managers. It doesn’t matter where you sit.”

Despite those advances, one of the insurance industry’s most persistent technology problems remains connecting agency management systems, agency employees, and insurance carriers.

Hernandez described creating that connection as “the golden egg.”

“It’s the bridge between the management system, the person at the desk, and the carrier,” he said.

Building that bridge remains difficult because information within traditional agency management systems can be difficult or expensive to access, and some insurers still lack API capabilities.

“Traditional AMS systems, they lock the information in their databases,” Hernandez said. While access is sometimes available, it often comes “for a very large price,” he said. “So agencies are frustrated about that.”

The carrier side of the equation has improved over the past five years as more insurers have invested in APIs, but carriers face their own challenges because developing the connections can be expensive, particularly when there is no certainty agencies will use them.

“They have the dilemma of, ‘Do I build the APIs? Do I build this bridge to make quoting easy or pulling documents easier? If I do it, are agents actually going to use it?'” Hernandez said.

Solving that connectivity problem, he said, could determine how effective agencies and carriers are in the next generation of AI-powered automation.

Anurag Shah, chief data officer for agency network SIAA, has been working on AI-powered automation and business intelligence platforms within SIAA’s ecosystem since his firm, formerly Donna AI, was acquired by the agency network in 2025.

“We are building the trifecta–Agency IQ, for the members; Network IQ, for SIAA master agencies; and we just launched Partner IQ, which is for our carrier partners,” Shah said.

“This is really important because the carriers are equally critical. The members have to benefit, but the carriers have to benefit. So, our goal is to help them match in the best way, with the best product and the best member for that match, who can benefit the most while keeping the end policyholder in mind all the time.”

Like others in the agency tech space, Shah and his team are focused on ways in which AI can improve efficiency and ramp up business intelligence. “A simple example is all our members are required to submit their monthly remittance to SIAA, which shows them how much commission business for the month,” he said.

“That takes several hours every month, but now we are fully automating it. Now they can do it in 10 minutes. This doesn’t need any complex AI explanation, but it’s something that takes six hours to do every month,” he said. “So, if we can save six hours for every member multiplied by 5,000 members, that’s the number of hours we create that they can spend with their members and with their customers and with their policyholders.” It’s giving back time to do other things.

There are also more complex things like sentiment scores, retention, and cross-selling. “These have been the top three focus areas from the data perspective,” he said. “For the retention model, we were already predicting customers who are likely to leave, who are not happy, which can help agents identify that risk of losing their customers early on.” So far, the accuracy of predicting retention risk has been really good, he said.

Not every member agency is sold on the latest technologies, he said. “I think there’s some hesitancy in sharing data.” There’s also hesitancy when employees see exactly what some AI can do. “Their first thought might be, ‘Am I going to be fired because of that?'” he said. “But in reality, what we are seeing is that agencies can scale their operations and people can do more things than they were doing.”

That doesn’t mean job roles will not change. “People’s roles might change,” he said. But it’s no different than other monumental technology changes, he added. “It’s the same when people moved from paper policies to computers and all digital.”

Vishal Sankhla, co-founder and CEO of Outmarket AI, an insurance-specific artificial intelligence platform built primarily for insurance agencies and brokerages, said that AI is changing the paradigm of how agencies and their employees do work. The future will be about the work it can do, not how it will replace humans.

“AI is definitely getting into this mode where we can now actually get the work done,” Sankhla said. “AI is now going from answering the questions to actually doing the work.”

“We are at a place where we’ve built a lot of these Lego blocks (AI tools) that are very reliable and very trustworthy. Now we can put them together to get tasks done,” he said. “So, doing something that would take an experienced account manager 30 or 40 minutes can now be done in two minutes, and it can be done in a very thorough manner because it’s happening end to end,” he explained.

Sankhla has held senior product development roles at Cision, Uber, and Facebook, but it was his entry into the life insurance world, at Ethos, where he and his co-founder realized the “huge opportunity” within commercial insurance to help brokers “work better, centralize all this data that gets fragmented all over the place, so you can now actually start to make more meaning out of the data.” Historically, growth in the agency world meant hiring more people or growing by acquisition. But the future of agency technology and AI innovation is leveling the playing field. “I think it’s going to make independent agencies, the small agencies, much more powerful,” he said.

“I think honestly that it’s a great time to be an independent agency, if you think about it,” he said. It’s not human versus AI; it’s both, he noted. “What consumers are telling us is they want both. They want the judgment, the relationship of an insurance professional, but they also want an amazing customer experience, which is what technology and AI can provide.”

“As an industry, we’re pretty focused on trying to maintain what keeps insurance special, which is the relationship portion of insurance,” Vertafore’s Thom said. “There aren’t too many agencies that we work with that are trying to fully replace human staff with AI. They’re largely focused on how do I grow faster? How do I help my people take manual work off their desks so that they can focus on higher quality service, higher quality relationships, and offer more advisory support?”

As a result, he finds technology and AI innovators more focused on eliminating manual work, not replacing the relationship. “There will always be horror stories about some carrier or some agency that fully replaced a whole bunch of staff with AI bots and service quality drops as a result,” he said. People aren’t getting the support that they need. “But I think as long as we keep the human in the loop, and focus on that, then we’re going to see real value from this technology in the industry,” he added.

“You’ll find that firms grow faster. People have more satisfying jobs focusing on high-value tasks and high-value work, and people will probably feel less stressed with the stack of tasks and paper that’s on their desk on a day-to-day basis,” Thom said. “AI gives us an opportunity to accelerate our pace and it’s driving change.”