Customizable tech solution offers
an opportunity to build a “perfect employee”
By Christopher W. Cook
In 2016, while they were students at Babson College near Boston, brothers Michael and Matthew Vega-Sanz built a peer-to-peer carsharing app, which included an infrastructure to insure the vehicles. It went viral, reaching the top 100 on the App Store, and quickly spread to cover vehicles at over 500 campuses across the United States. A few years later, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a cease in operations.
Needing to pivot, the brothers realized that the infrastructure that was already built could help businesses manage their insurance. The brothers’ second business grew faster than the first one—generating over $50 million in recurring revenue after three years.
“The experience taught us two things,” says Roberto Salinas, a friend of the brothers from college, who has worked with them since 2020. “First, the insurance industry runs on systems that haven’t kept up with the way customers expect to do business today. Agents are spending too much time on manual work—answering the same questions, chasing documents, helping their customers submit claims. Customers want instant service, but most agencies don’t have the resources to scale without adding overhead.
“Instead of having to answer, ‘when is my next payment due’ or ‘what are the coverage limits here,’ agents can focus on revenue producing activities for the agency. The idea is to scale your business without increasing head count … .”
—Roberto Salinas
Head of Business Development
GAIL
“Second, AI was going to change everything, but general-purpose AI doesn’t work well for highly specialized industries like insurance. It lacks the deep industry knowledge needed to handle workflows, industry-specific software solutions, and compliance.”
While Matthew had an idea to bring AI to the insurance industry in 2023, Salinas decided to get feedback from nearby insurance agencies. He drove around Miami, where he lived at the time, and visited six agencies within a 10-mile radius of his then-current workplace. “Of those six, four of them wanted to speak to me. Of those four, two of them were like, ‘when you build it, we will buy it,’” he recalls.
This was the birth of GAIL, which officially launched in April 2024.
Building the “perfect employee”
Even the best salespeople aren’t selling 100% of the time. Imagine how much more they could sell if they weren’t performing mundane repetitive tasks throughout the day, like answering the same questions on the phone. This is where the GAIL team of software engineers, who Salinas, GAIL’s head of business development, calls the “real architects of the product,” worked their magic.
“GAIL is a conversational artificial intelligence built to address the scarcity of insurance professionals in the independent agent channel,” Salinas says. “It is not meant to replace an agent, but it’s mostly meant to increase the number of productive hours that an agent has during the day.
“Instead of having to answer, ‘when is my next payment due’ or ‘what are the coverage limits here,’ agents can focus on revenue producing activities for the agency. The idea is to scale your business without increasing head count, and we do that by answering phones for customers whether it be inbound or outbound.”
GAIL’s conversational AI solution is customizable, giving users the opportunity to build “the perfect employee,” according to the company’s website. This includes personalizing the voice used, including dialects and the use of slang. With the ability to “speak” both English and Spanish, the omnichannel product can be used through voice, text, email and WhatsApp, assisting with answering basic questions, generating quotes, initiating renewals and helping submit claims.
However, “GAIL is more than just a conversational tool,” Salinas notes.
For example:
Never needing a break, GAIL is available 24/7, ensuring that agencies can serve more clients at any time.
The “Ask GAIL” function allows agents to instantly retrieve policy details, customer data, and key insights without the need to dig through multiple systems.
The product’s interactive dashboard provides real-time insights, including tracking customer interactions, automating follow-ups and identifying sales opportunities.
Reducing an agent’s manual workload, GAIL can gather information to generate quotes, follow up on renewals and help customers submit claims.
“This results in agents selling more, providing better support to their customers, and operating more efficiently—without adding extra staff,” Salinas says.
GAIL can be integrated with a variety of systems used by agencies (e.g., CRMs, VOIPs and others), but can also work as a stand-alone product.
“We built a pretty nifty integration with AgencyZoom, where we are able to keep record of different touch points with customers,” Salinas says. “We’re constantly coming out with new features. We try to push at least one update per week, whether that be quality of life, additional functionality or some other kind of improvement.”
Agency successes and getting started
With the ability to make inbound and outbound calls, Salinas notes how GAIL has helped some of its clients.
During one of last year’s hurricanes in Florida, for instance, GAIL was set up with an agency to transfer calls regarding claims to the respective carrier for the client. “We added all the carriers they were working with into a digital directory and then trained GAIL on asking questions to get that customer where they needed to go. Within one week of having that set up, GAIL had handled and transferred over 700 calls to the respective claims departments,” Salinas says.
For a large Florida-based client, GAIL takes all the inbound calls for the office’s main line—anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 calls per week.
For outbound calls, one agency client has generated around $140,000 in premiums with leads that GAIL brought into the agency.
For agencies interested in learning more, a form can be filled out on the company’s website to receive a phone call from GAIL to interact with the product. “I would then recommend scheduling a demo, which is important in the process because it’s pretty new technology, so we want to make sure that it works for the agency,” Salinas says.
Support is included in the subscription. “Our support reps work pretty much around the clock, making sure that your scripts are set up properly and that your line transfers are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
“Each GAIL account comes with a phone number that we purchase on the agency’s behalf, so they don’t have to change any phone numbers on their website or anything else for that matter.
“Implementation is generally easy. We do give a one-hour onboarding session to every single one of our customers, and more if it’s needed,” Salinas concludes.
For more information:
GAIL
meetgail.com
