AI Tools Give Insurance Agencies More Time for Service and Growth

Insurance agencies are testing AI against a familiar constraint: staff time. Early examples suggest the tools can absorb routine calls and paperwork, giving employees more room for customer service, coverage discussions and new business. The gains depend, though, on fitting the technology into agency workflows and keeping people involved where judgment and relationships matter.

At bolt Agency, an AI receptionist now handles about 90% of inbound calls, according to Dave Rose, bolt’s head of agency and embedded performance. The digital agency serves more than 20,000 policies across the U.S. with a 30-person team. After six months with the tool, call-to-bind conversions had doubled, drop-offs from its interactive voice response system had fallen 32%, and agent talk time had declined 36%, Rose said.

Those measures point to a practical problem AI may help address: when service calls consume staff capacity, employees can struggle to pursue new business or respond to every customer who needs help. Rose said agency staff were spending too much time routing callers and too little time assisting them. He hears similar concerns from other agents, whose teams can be so occupied with service that they struggle to keep up with new business.

For Rose, the goal is to direct repetitive work to technology and reserve human attention for tasks that benefit from expertise. Employees can focus on explaining coverage, advising clients and building relationships, especially when a policyholder’s needs or insurance arrangements are more complex. That division of work shapes how several agency technology leaders describe AI’s near-term role.

Back-office work gets faster

James Thom, chief product officer at Vertafore, sees potential across agency management systems, rating tools, workflow products and customer relationship management software. He said development has accelerated over the past two years, with clearer benefits emerging in the last 12 months. The most visible changes so far are in back-office tasks and service workflows.

Agencies may use AI to speed up cash receipt reconciliation, policy checks, quote reviews, comparisons and proposal preparation. These jobs have traditionally required employees to move information between records, documents and software. Automating parts of that process can shorten turnaround and help staff deliver more consistent service, Thom said.

Vertafore has spent the past year developing its AI platform and working with other AI providers to make their products operate more smoothly within agency management systems. The aim is to give shared clients a more connected workflow, rather than asking employees to navigate disconnected tools for each task.

Thom said AI can reduce processes that once involved 10, 15 or 20 steps to only a few. Examples include adding a vehicle to a customer’s policy and reconciling insurer statements in an agency’s accounting work. Such changes can remove time-consuming handling from employees’ desks, but Thom emphasized that service requests should still include human involvement.

That distinction matters because efficiency alone doesn’t guarantee a good customer experience. Thom said people remain central to service, particularly when a customer needs advice or when a request calls for context. AI can prepare information and handle repetitive steps, leaving the employee better placed to address the relationship and advisory parts of the work.

Connecting systems remains a hurdle

Javier Hernandez, chief information officer at U.S.-based agency network ISU Steadfast, sees AI accelerating workflow automation, product development and connections among software systems. He pointed to specialized agency workflows from companies such as Outmarket and to new management systems as signs of a significant shift.

Hernandez traced the change to three developments: application programming interfaces, AI’s ability to interpret and interact with different software, and the growing ease of building and testing products. New tools can be created and refined more quickly than before. That makes experimentation easier, though speed doesn’t guarantee that every product will prove useful or last.

Automation itself has been around for years, but Hernandez said it now takes less technical effort to build automated processes. AI can help create the tools that carry out those processes. Agentic AI extends the idea: instead of programming every action in advance, a system can receive broader instructions and use context to work through a task with less step-by-step direction.

Hernandez expects employees’ work to change as these systems receive and process more information. He suggested that more people could take on project management responsibilities as AI handles a larger share of task execution. That possibility depends on how agencies deploy the tools and reshape roles as the technology develops.

But one longstanding obstacle remains: connecting agency management systems, agency employees and insurers. Hernandez called that connection “the golden egg”—a bridge that would let information move between the system, the person working at a desk and the insurer.

Access to information held in traditional agency management systems can be difficult or costly, Hernandez said. Some systems keep data in databases that are hard for outside tools to reach, and access may come at a high price. On the insurer side, more companies have invested in APIs over the past five years, but building and maintaining connections can still be expensive. Insurers may also question whether agencies will use a connection once it is available.

Better links could make it easier to obtain quotes or retrieve documents, and could help AI tools complete more work across company boundaries. Until those connections become more practical, agencies may find that automation works well inside one system but still encounters friction when information has to pass between an agency and an insurer.

Network tools target agency and insurer needs

Anurag Shah, chief data officer at agency network SIAA, is developing automation and business intelligence tools for agencies, network offices and insurer partners. His firm, formerly Donna AI, was acquired by SIAA in 2025. The network’s three products are Agency IQ for member agencies, Network IQ for SIAA master agencies, and Partner IQ for insurer partners.

Shah said the products are designed to help agencies and insurers find suitable matches between a customer, an agency and an insurance product, with the policyholder in mind. That reflects a broader aim in agency technology: improve operating efficiency while helping the people involved identify where a product and a customer’s needs may fit.

A more immediate example is monthly commission remittance. SIAA members submit records showing commission business for the month, a process Shah said could take several hours. The network has automated it, reducing the work to about 10 minutes. He estimated that saving six hours for each of 5,000 members would return a substantial amount of staff time for customer and policyholder work.

SIAA is also applying data tools to sentiment, retention and cross-selling. Its retention model is intended to flag customers who may be unhappy or likely to leave, giving agents an earlier opportunity to identify a relationship at risk. Shah said the model’s accuracy had been strong so far, without providing a specific rate.

Adoption still involves concerns. Some agency members are hesitant to share data, Shah said, and employees may worry that AI will put their jobs at risk. His experience is that automation can let agencies expand what they do and help staff take on more work. Roles may change, he said, much as they changed when agencies moved from paper policies to digital systems.

From answers to completed tasks

Vishal Sankhla, co-founder and CEO of Outmarket AI, said agency technology is moving from answering questions to carrying out work. He described AI tools as building blocks that can be combined into a complete process. A task that might take an experienced account manager 30 or 40 minutes, he said, can take about two minutes when handled end to end by the system.

Sankhla entered insurance through life insurer Ethos after product development roles at Cision, Uber and Facebook. He and his co-founder saw an opportunity in commercial insurance to help brokers bring scattered information together and use it more effectively. Historically, agencies looking to grow often added employees or expanded through acquisitions. Sankhla said AI could give independent and smaller agencies more ways to increase their capacity.

He sees the customer experience as a combination of professional judgment and technology. Customers want the relationship and judgment of an insurance professional, he said, along with the convenience technology can provide. That makes the question less about whether people or AI will handle agency work and more about which tasks each can perform well.

Thom also sees agency technology companies concentrating on removing manual work, rather than replacing the customer relationship. He said agencies commonly want to grow and give employees more time for service, advice and stronger client relationships. He cautioned that service quality can suffer when organizations rely too heavily on automated systems and customers cannot reach the support they need.

For agencies considering these tools, the examples offer concrete areas to watch: call routing, routine service transactions, accounting and document work, quote preparation, retention signals and the links that carry information between systems. The reported results vary by task and organization, and the source examples don’t establish that every agency will see the same time savings or business outcomes. The common thread is that AI can take on repeatable work while employees remain responsible for the conversations and decisions that call for human expertise.

As the tools mature, agencies will need workflows that connect their systems and make clear where an employee reviews or completes the work. The potential payoff is more capacity for service and growth; whether that payoff arrives will depend on integration, staff adoption and maintaining the human support policyholders expect.