Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest buzzwords in the independent insurance industry right now – and most others. It’s becoming clearer by the day that independent insurance agencies can drastically reduce the time and effort spent on many daily tasks by implementing AI. And yet, adoption at agencies is still slow. In a recent article, ACT shared that more than half of their survey respondents were interested in using AI tools for work, but only about 6% of agents said their agency had actually implemented AI.
What’s the disconnect? There are a number of challenges in successfully implementing AI workflows at an agency, from data security and standardization struggles to the overwhelming number of available tools. Add in the newness of the technology and the general confusion surrounding best practices, and it can be an intimidating project for insurance agencies.
We’ve created a simple roadmap for getting started quickly with AI at your agency, complete with tips and insights from two customers we spoke with who are in the process of implementing AI at their agency: Dennis McCurdy of McCurdy Group and Tanya Horst of Cedar Risk Management.
In this article
If you’re feeling unfamiliar with AI tools, the best place to start is learning more about what they are and how they can help. Watch a webinar, take an online class, or even watch some YouTube videos! Dennis and Tanya both shared that they took a course on AI to start out, which helped spark some ideas for using it at their agencies. You can also look for forums or discussion groups on AI in the agent groups you belong to, such as associations and networks, technology user groups, and more.
Don’t feel like you have to know everything before getting started – just do enough research to get some good ideas of concrete ways AI can help with your agency’s workflows. Here are a few resources that might help!
Resources on implementing AI
Identify a few areas where AI can help save your agency time on manual processes or tedious workflows. This will help you decide which tool will best meet your needs. Here are some of the places agencies can find the biggest time savings by implementing AI:
One of the easiest places to start is using AI tools to help you craft or review content for email communications, social media posts, video or client conversation scripts, and more. Just enter your ideas, notes, or bullet points and get AI to help create a first draft!
Another simple time-saving use case is having AI summarize long documents to give you the important points. You can use it to summarize meetings, client calls, files and documents, and more.
If you’re ready to try out a workflow with actual policies, consider using AI tools to compare quotes or policies, look for coverage gaps, or verify compliance.
Content creation
Dennis and Tanya are both currently using AI to help them create content for marketing materials like emails and social media posts. Dennis has also experimented with using it to create podcast-style audio discussions that explain coverages in a conversational style that’s accessible and easy for customers to understand.
Quote comparison, summarization, and proposal creation
Tanya is experimenting with using AI to compare quotes to the bound policy to ensure nothing is missing. “I'll use it to put multiple quotes in and have it build out one proposal that includes a summary each quote,” she says. “It takes a while for someone to go through all the quotes and do the comparison manually, but it’s a lot faster with AI.”
She estimates these workflows are 30-50% faster using AI. While she’s the primary person using AI at her agency right now, the agency plans to roll out the process to account managers and CSRs in the future.
Renewal summaries, policy answers, and coverage recommendations
Dennis is using AI to help with his commercial renewal processes. He uploads policies into his AI tool (Google’s Notebook LM) to quickly extract key information like limits for buildings, personal property, and liability, and to make coverage recommendations. “For commercial renewals,” he says, “I always give clients a very detailed policy summary with recommendations. Now I can just drop the policy in Notebook LM, and I’ve created a prompt so it will give me the important details and even list recommendations for the client.”
He’s found success using AI for policy review so far. “I find it a tremendous timesaver,” he says. “My commercial lines staff is using it now to look at policies, ask it questions, and get quick answers or details from the policy instead of having to search through the whole thing themselves.”
Want more ideas on how to use AI to help your agency with your specific needs or workflows? Just ask an AI tool for recommendations using a prompt like this:
We are a [size] independent insurance agency in [state/region] with x% personal lines, x% commercial lines, and a focus on [niche or area of expertise]. Some of our most time-intensive tasks are ___. What are the most impactful ways we can implement this tool to save time on these tasks?
Once you know which processes you need help with, you can choose the right AI tool to help with your needs. If you’re starting simple with content creation or summarization, you may be able to use free tools like Chat GPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot. For more complex or policy-specific workflows, you might be better served by paid subscriptions or tools built specifically for insurance. Several HawkSoft API Partners and Solution Partners offer AI features - see them all here.
You may want to play around with a few different tools to see which one works best for your needs. Many tools offer free versions or a month-long free trial of the software, which can help you get a feel for them before making a purchasing decision. You may even decide to use multiple tools for different workflows.
Choosing the right tool is a crucial step, and there are some extremely important things to consider. Here are a few of the most important things to pay attention to.
What is the cost of the tool, and how does it compare to the time and efficiency savings you’ll gain by using it?
Is the tool intuitive to use, easy for staff to adopt, and simple to train new users on?
Does the tool have the potential to scale to fit more of your agency’s workflows in the future?
Dennis has used Chat GPT and Copilot, and currently uses Google’s Notebook LM for his commercial policy workflows. Tanya has also tried a number of tools including ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. She prefers a tool called Manus for policy-related workflows, as she finds it better for professional use.
“With Chat GPT,” she says, “it’s a little more personal and informal, whereas Manus seems more thorough in its output, and produces things a little more professionally. I can do a lot more in Manus as far as being able to edit documents within it without having to download them first.”
Once you’ve selected one or more tools, the best way to help agency staff successfully implement it into workflows is to have guidelines for using the tool. This not only helps staff understand how to use it, but prevents the tool from being misused or generating bad results.
Your guide doesn’t have to be exhaustive – you can start with a few simple rules and add to it over time. At a minimum, the guide should address these basic areas:
Be specific about what tools are and are not approved for use at the agency, and which types of workflows they should and should not be used for.
Define what type of information should not be uploaded into the tool, such as sensitive client information.
To get consistent results across different staff members and clients, it’s best to use the same starting templates for prompts. Create a prompt guide with basic templates for each workflow. Some tools allow you to create specific “agents” for different types of tasks, so you might want to set these up for the most common tasks at your agency.
Work completed by AI should always be reviewed by a human to make sure it’s accurate and meets your quality standards. Create guidelines around what staff should do to review work for accuracy.
Dennis shares these tips for data security when using AI tools: “We’ve configured our tools so they don’t share any data outside our organization. But if you want to be extra careful, when uploading a policy, you can remove the page with the client details so it doesn’t include any personal information. Or you can even upload a blank policy so the AI can understand the format and type of information it includes.”
Tanya emphasizes the importance of reviewing AI’s results. “We always review everything,” she says, “to make sure we’re not missing anything and nothing’s going to hit our E&O. You may have to do some tweaking or fix some formatting, but it’s still so much faster than starting from scratch.”
Once you have your tools and guidelines ready, you can begin implementation at your agency. Remember, this will be a learning process for everyone, so have patience and be willing to experiment and learn as you go! Here are a few tips to remember.
There are an overwhelming number of options out there, but don’t let decision paralysis take hold. Start small with one workflow you want to improve, one AI tool, and one user. If the tool isn’t working as well as you’d hoped, try a different one. Once your first user has a process smoothed out, start rolling it out to more staff members.
The more information you provide the tool, the better your results will be. Make sure your prompts are specific and the data you upload is structured so the tool can make sense of it.
You won’t be perfect at first, but you don’t know what you don’t know until you get started. The best way to learn is by doing, so jump in and start experimenting and exploring! Not everything will be a good fit for AI and you might have some failures along the way, but that will help refine your processes over time.
“Don’t be afraid of AI,” is Dennis’s advice to other agents. “The people who are the most likely to be replaced by AI are the ones who don’t learn how to use it. It’s here, and it’s not going anywhere, so learn how to use it. I’m a Baby Boomer and if I can learn to use it, anyone can!”
Tanya’s suggestion is to “just dive in and get your hands dirty. Play around with it and see what’s out there. Ask other people what they’re doing with it. Once you start using it, it’s easy to run with it and find new uses for it.”
Learn more about AITake a look at some of the other educational pieces HawkSoft has available on AI topics! |