AI helps agents serve clients better
By Doug Mohr
The market is changing. Again.
Through the most recent hard market, premiums were high everywhere, and carriers pulled out of high-risk markets. Policyholders had fewer choices about where to go for their coverage. Now, as the insurance market stabilizes across nearly all lines, premiums aren’t growing as much year over year—and in some lines, they’re decreasing. Carriers are re-entering markets they left not long ago, and agencies don’t see their books growing with the increases in premiums we saw during the hard market.
End-insureds are changing their behavior, too.
Years of rising home and auto insurance costs have put considerable pressure on the agent-client relationship. The Home Buying Institute shows in a February 2026 article that homeowners’ premiums grew an average of 24% in the years following the pandemic, and higher home and auto premiums led to record levels of clients shopping out and switching carriers.
At the same time, the standard for service changed almost everywhere else in clients’ lives. Consumers got used to businesses being available 24/7 across channels. McKinsey & Company says experiences with other companies have shaped customers’ expectations for personalized advice and seamless service in insurance.
After several years of pricing pressure and constrained choice, clients are reevaluating their options. Service and trust will influence who keeps their business. To provide the excellent service that clients expect, agents need to embrace new technology tools that cut out administrative tasks and give them more capacity to fulfill their role as a trusted advisor.
The agencies advancing their AI projects are finding an advantage in the market because they’re creating more capacity for their staff, and staff are using their extra bandwidth to build better relationships with their clients.
Why client expectations are changing
There’s a gap between what policyholders want and what they get. Agency staff are increasingly spread thin. Vertafore’s policyholder report found that nearly all end-insureds want agent involvement when managing their policy, but only one in five say their agent is communicating with them outside of renewals.
The breakdown that prevents agents from meeting the growing expectation for direct interaction is coming from back-office tasks that don’t directly affect the client. Agents’ time is consumed by emails, reconciliation, document handling, data entry and reentry, and disconnected workflows.
To fulfill that role as a trusted advisor, agents should reinforce the core function of an agent and strengthen their relationships.
The objective for agencies looking to grow right now should be to reduce the amount of effort dedicated to those back-office tasks and increase the amount of time spent with their clients insuring the right coverage for the risks they have as well as being there in their time of need when something changes or a claim is filed.
Enhancing the role of the agent
I hear a lot of people say that they don’t trust technology, particularly AI.
The Big “I”’s 2026 Agents Council for Technology Tech Trends Report found that the current top concerns about AI are data privacy or compliance risks or inaccurate outputs, followed closely by losing the human touch.
It’s worth noting that just 8% of those respondents are currently using AI regularly and strategically.
The agencies advancing their AI projects are finding an advantage in the market because they’re creating more capacity for their staff, and staff are using their extra bandwidth to build better relationships with their clients.
Agency staff are concerned about where people are being replaced. Agencies should instead be asking why highly trained insurance professionals are dedicating hours every week to work that doesn’t require insurance expertise. The purpose of adopting AI isn’t to remove the human touch but instead to put human expertise where it has the greatest value.
Small agencies in particular have an opportunity to see big gains by adopting AI. By reducing the amount of time producers and CSRs spend on administrative work, agencies can grow the business without needing to add staff.
In a 2026 Big “I” discussion,
LP Insurance described using AI to address bottlenecks in policy review, proposals, and comparison work, reducing administrative burden and increasing capacity for client relationships and growth. Other agencies, like Insurance Associates of Central Connecticut, LLC, have been applying AI coverage comparison to improve quality and speed or using AI to reduce the direct work that staff do on accounting tasks like reconciliation.
As The Big “I”’s report shows, many agencies are still adopting AI technology. Agencies that aren’t doing so can find an advantage by testing tools to find out how they can help the business. Agencies should start with their existing relationships to find out how tech partners’ roadmaps line up with agency goals.
Where AI creates capacity
Agents’ number one priority is the client, not managing a tech stack, and most agents will probably choose to ignore technology if it hinders their ability to service a client. But by embracing the right technology, certain tasks can all but disappear from the to-do list.
Correspondence. The more mature technologies available to agencies can handle inbound digital communications. The emails, texts, and phone calls coming in can all be routed and filtered automatically. AI tools can ingest information from clients, the most important calls get flagged or routed to the right person, and AI can even suggest a response. Staff simply review and approve.
We all know that managing your email inbox can be a daunting task. Imagine a world where an AI agent can interpret the intent of an email and determine the action that needs to occur in your system of record, your agency management system (AMS). The time has come when you don’t have to tell the AMS what needs to be done based on the inbound email from your customer; AI agents can automatically set up a follow-up task based on the content of the email.
When correspondence is triaged automatically, CSRs aren’t simply answering email faster but responding better.
Policy work. Not many people go into insurance because they love paperwork, but a lot of time is spent on policy comparison, document ingestion, coverage recommendations, and proposal generation. These tasks can all be handled by AI with a human in the loop. AI will ingest a policy to do quote comparison, generate a proposal, and provide a recommendation based on the risk you’re looking to write.
Agents still handle the important advisory role with clients: They will need to understand the clients’ needs and their risks and discuss the right level of coverage, but AI can help with data entry and syncing information with carriers and underwriters to secure coverage.
Accounting. Direct bill reconciliation is one of the most tedious workflows in an agency, and it happens every single month. AI tools can now handle matching carrier statements to transactions, and staff can step in to handle exceptions. The human in the loop only needs to directly work on the pieces that require attention rather than going over every entry. The process gets cut down from several hours to a few minutes.
Other tools will make agents better at the work they already do. Clients aren’t interested in how quickly information gets entered into an AMS; they want an agent who understands their business or the specific risks of their geographic area.
The function of an insurance agent doesn’t change: They will always be needed to work with clients and help them protect the most valuable parts of their life. AI will make sure that administrative tasks are done faster and more efficiently, so agents can instead focus on those human functions.
More time for work that matters
As the market continues to get more competitive, agencies need to worry about writing new business and protecting their existing book in order to grow.
For a small agency, this relationship extends beyond renewals. Agency owners, producers, and CSRs are ingrained in the communities they serve. They understand the families and local businesses behind the policies and the changing risks those families and businesses face.
This dynamic has always been one of the independent agency channel’s greatest strengths. Agencies now need to protect it by removing the manual work that repeatedly pulls them in different directions.
The most important outcome of greater efficiency is simple: Agency professionals get more time with their clients. They can also learn how to serve their clients better.
We all still have just 40 hours in a work week, give or take. The time agents recover can be better spent studying the industries they serve, researching emerging risks, or preparing for client meetings. In filling the role of a trusted advisor, producers and CSRs need to understand the dynamics of the industries they’re serving.
AI tools built for insurance can help agents develop their specialty, understand the nuances of a particular industry, the client’s policy, and make sure their risk is properly covered.
Technology should allow agents to spend more of their day applying judgment, sharing expertise, and building trust. AI investment should be measured by whether it makes the agency better at being an agency.
Every repetitive task offloaded from staff creates another opportunity to strengthen the relationship that keeps a client from looking for a policy somewhere else.
The author
Doug Mohr, vice president of industry relations and partnerships at Vertafore, leads the firm’s team that looks towards industry trends and manages strategic partnerships, including the Orange Partner Program members and industry organizations such as The Big “I” (IIABA), Invest, ID Federation, and ACORD. Mohr brings over 40 years of software and technology experience, having worked at companies that provide solutions to a variety of industries including insurance, healthcare, apparel, professional services, high tech, and manufacturing.
