AI: Going beyond the chatbot

There’s no doubt that advanced technology such as artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly prominent role across the insurance business. But the benefits and challenges offered by AI can vastly differ between large carriers and independent agents or the agencies they work with.

Experts told InsuranceNewsNet that independent agents can make the most use of AI in surprising ways to: 

» Generate leads

» Strengthen cold-calling prospects

» Help identify coverage gaps for upselling

» Provide quotes or shop renewals much faster, creating even more sales opportunities

But the solution isn’t as simple as creating a prompt that does all the work for you. 

To begin with, experts we spoke with said most agents — whether they work with a smaller agency without sophisticated infrastructure or a larger firm that already has its own preapproved tools — aren’t even taking the basic steps required to leverage AI and bring more quality leads in or take advantage of more sales opportunities.

They suggested ways AI should — and shouldn’t — be leveraged and emphasized that the tool shouldn’t be relied on to do all the work.

Outbound leads

Andrei Craciunescu, CEO of RiskCube, suggests AI can indirectly generate more business. Still, it’s not a magic wand that will automatically produce a list of high-quality leads for agents to chase.

“If you only rely on AI and if you think that AI can bring customers and you can make money just with it, maybe it works for you. But for us, it didn’t,” Craciunescu said.

He told InsuranceNewsNet it is possible for independent agents to “get customers or leads with AI, but the quality of your leads will be very low.”

“If you want high-quality customers, I don’t think that AI can really solve that yet,” he said. “From our experience now, in the last months, the highest-quality customers and the highest-quality leads are still coming through networks and not through AI agents that sell for us.”

RiskCube, a San Francisco-based company founded by Craciunescu in 2024, defines itself as “an AI-native insurance broker for startups.” As its founder, Craciunescu said it’s a highly specialized boutique agency that specializes in space and defense.

But Craciunescu also says he built the organization with the idea to better leverage “what are the parts of the agency that you can automate with AI and what are the parts where using AI doesn’t make sense.”

And in his experience, AI is just not the right tool for strong outbound prospects. 

He noted that when it comes to buying and selling insurance, trust and expertise simply “play a much higher role than AI can provide at the moment,” especially with higher premiums as customers scrutinize agents and carriers more.

“I wouldn’t say that outbound is working with AI. … We realized you can use AI to enhance your expertise or answer questions faster, but it’s very difficult to get leads with AI. Even if you get leads, if you cannot qualify them, if they don’t convert, you have nothing in the end, and then you lose your time,” Craciunescu said.

Leveraging AI search

While finding outbound prospects may not be the best use of AI, Craciunescu said there “is a space where you can get leads through AI” from the inbound side.

The opportunity, he said, is in leveraging search engine optimization — or its newer counterparts, generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization. 

SEO is a common term used in marketing. It describes a strategy used to increase a website’s  ranking on popular search engines such as Google, increasing the website’s visibility so that more people can view it. 

With more people using chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines, many marketers have shifted to GEO and/or AEO to increase chances that a popular chatbot will redirect customers to their website. 

Craciunescu suggested this kind of inbound sales strategy, where customers are directed to an agent’s website, is a much more effective use of AI. But in his experience, establishing the basics of SEO needed to leverage this strategy effectively is where most agents fall short.

“I see that most of the insurance agents don’t do that in the first phase,” he said. “When you have SEO established in the first step, that’s already a great foundation. And then in the second phase, you can include more things that are tailored to your ideal customer profile. But you can’t skip the foundation.”

He said RiskCube has been able to use this strategy to the point where they get most of their cold inbound customers through AI searches from Claude and Gemini. 

However, he also acknowledged that it works because the company operates in a small, niche market where they are basically the only agency Claude recognizes as experts in that field. 

“I can tell you, we get high-quality leads through inbounds at the moment, and this is what we want,” he said. “We don’t want to invest in outbound because we want that customer to find us.  There are not many agencies in defense, so this is where we can really win. If you win one category in insurance, then Claude can scale this for you.”

Data, insights and messaging

While the AI search optimization strategy may be a winner for smaller businesses, the same strategy may not be the best for a larger firm. 

For example, Rob Erfurt, national industry leader and New Jersey market leader at World Insurance Associates, said agents can miss a lot of AI’s other value by looking at only this one path.

“AI has come on the scene so quickly in insurance that what we’re seeing on a day-to-day basis is users interacting with it like it’s an internet search engine,” Erfurt said. “When you take that approach, you miss a lot of value that AI can offer from text generation, speech recognition and a smart automation standpoint.”

Like Craciunescu, he agreed that using AI for leads can have limitations, but from more of a data aspect.

“An example of how AI is being used inefficiently as it relates to lead generation is someone asking for a list of prospects in a given industry or geography,” Erfurt said. “While it can pull data, it’s not too different from the databases people buy data from now, which is to say a lot of the metrics are stale.

“The opportunity with AI, from a lead generation standpoint, is to not just pull a list but to enrich the data. So, when we talk about data enrichment, it’s the idea that we can enhance what we have with more reliable data points and metrics.”

Erfurt emphasized that this is important because independent agents must make the most use of their time instead of chasing stale leads. 

“There are only 168 hours in the week; we have limited time to prospect with all the needs of our existing clients. If we make 10 calls, we want to talk to 10 decision-makers. We don’t want to find out that those 10 people don’t work at the company anymore,” he said. 

AI can also help agents save time by shaping their messaging, such as with text generation, which Erfurt said is “one of the most effective ways to leverage AI from a new business standpoint.”

However, he said agents must start with having a sales plan — and, like Craciunescu, he said most agents fail this first step.

“It starts with your messaging,” Erfurt said. “From there, coming up with your sales plan — Who am I going to call? What is the best solution for them? That can help with your new business prospecting or your cross-selling. What we found is most people don’t have a plan, and that’s where you start to waste time.”

According to Erfurt, leveraging AI is all about “finding efficiencies and compressing time” — for example, using AI infrastructure to find coverage gaps or upsell opportunities in existing accounts.

“Talk to the platform about what it is you do that’s repetitive and ask how it can help, and it will outline the value that can be created. You don’t have to be highly technical to do these things,” he said. 

He noted that World Insurance Associates can do this through a tech stack where its AI platform is integrated with the company’s customer relationtship management tool, marketing automation and Power BI tool. 

“We’re able to leverage our IT-approved AI platform to all client opportunities out of Power BI to tell us what they’re most likely to buy next. I’d say that’s a more sophisticated model,” Erfurt said.

Faster sales

One other way AI can help agents and brokers is by speeding up the quote-
buying cycle of the entire process, according to Scot Barton, chief product officer at Carpe Data. He told InsuranceNewsNet this opens up the door for market expansion. 

“That opportunity for them is a speed of market expansion and a speed of gaining touchpoints internally and externally,” Barton said. “Now, with AI enablement, you have agents and brokers who are identifying options, they’re remarketing the accounts, they’re shopping for risks more frequently.”

Barton, a former Farmers Insurance executive, explained that before AI became so mainstream, the quote-buying cycle could take anywhere from six months to a year because of the many manual steps involved. He said many agents would do this only once a year, if at all, simply because the process was so tedious.

But now, with AI, they can do it every single day, maximizing sales opportunities. 

“Now, with AI, what we’re seeing is that it’s frictionless to get multiple quotes from different carriers, and they could do that daily,” Barton said. “You could literally cycle through all your independent channels daily looking for a price drop. When you get one, snag it because it’s showing your customer loyalty. That cycle of shop-to-buying to process, even with follow-ups, can all be automated, and so it’s happening much more frequently.”

This can even help with cold calls, he said. For example, an agent can automatically re-shop a quote from a year ago and “just reach out with a cold call saying, ‘Hey, I know you were in the market a year ago. Maybe I didn’t even meet your needs, but I found this one.’”

Or a “lackluster” quote could be “polished up a little bit easier with automated tools from AI, and now all of a sudden it looks like a legitimate, full quote that they could buy.”

Learning curve

With the many ways agents can leverage AI for sales, both Erfurt and Craciunescu said that insurance professionals cannot afford not to learn the basics of technology and AI in today’s age. 

For instance, Craciunescu said it took months before his company got their winning formula right.

“For us, this was a learning experience. We didn’t really understand all this. We spent almost six months without knowing anything about it. After six months, we were like, nobody’s coming through the website — we didn’t even get any inbound requests,” he noted.

“And I thought that Google would start to trust the website in about six months. But we still didn’t get it. I mean, here and there we got a few, but not scalable. Now we get almost daily inbound leads through the website.”

What changed for them was learning the basics of SEO and putting serious work into improving their rankings. 

For agents and agencies just starting to leverage this kind of technology, he said, they can start by understanding questions like “Who is your ideal customer profile?” “How can you establish trust in the industry that you’re operating in?” and “What do we need to publish tomorrow to increase the likelihood that people can find us through AI search?”

They can also ask customers for feedback to better understand what potential leads might be searching for, such as “How did you find us?” and “What is important for you when you search for an insurance provider?”

“It takes a while. But the earlier you start, the easier it will be afterward to get leads and everything. You have to invest in the foundation, and then you can scale on top of this with AI. But the earlier you start to understand that you need to build a great foundation, the better,” Craciunescu said.

It may be even easier for established agencies that already have a large client base, he added, as they “have already established customers, they know their customers, they just need to scale this more.”

“How can I generate more revenue with my existing headcount? That’s the main question. I think this is where AI can really help you to accelerate this. So, instead of having 10 customers a day, I can now have 50 customers a day. I think this is where the value of AI is coming in,” he said.

For Erfurt, meanwhile, the starting point for agents who may work with a larger agency is getting familiar with that agency’s approved AI platform and learning how it can help them achieve goals. 

He pointed out that using more common AI tools, many of which may not be agency-approved, could pose a macro security challenge for agents who work with larger agencies — compromising both client data and the agent’s employment. 

“The first step for anyone who doesn’t feel like they know how to use AI is to get into their company’s approved platform, create their profile by telling the platform what it is they do and their goals and their responsibilities, and then ask it how they should be thinking about a specific task in their job,” he said.

He said agents can “have really big, eye-opening moments” in an interaction like that because “they learn the tool can help them think about challenges in different ways.

“For folks who don’t have that infrastructure, who are just getting started, the advice I give everyone is learn how to use AI, and it’s easier than most people think,” Erfurt said.

No substitute

While there is a time and a place to leverage AI for scaling business, Craciunescu emphasized that it cannot replace the in-person connections that human agents make. 

“You still need to invest in going to events. AI cannot go to events; AI cannot go to conferences. So you still need to do these basics, because you cannot rely completely on AI to recommend you,” he said.

Barton also pointed out that just as many agents can feel overwhelmed by technology, so too can customers. This is where an agent’s personal touch can be the defining factor that makes a customer trust the product.

“The customer has the same experience the agent has; they’re inundated with too much information, too many quotes coming at them. One of the values the agent still has is that they have the inside knowledge on what the carriers really can do, how they deliver it, what the claims experience is,” Barton said.

“It isn’t just about the cheapest price; everyone wants to save money, but not at the expense of a terrible process. The agent can still add some comfort to the customer who’s also overwhelmed by the process.” 

Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter and editor with over 10 years’ combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at rayne.morgan@innfeedback.com.

Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter, and editor with over 10 years' combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at rayne.morgan@innfeedback.com.