Agentech assists insurance adjusters

An Oklahoma-based company using artificial intelligence "Minions" to streamline insurance claims has received $3 million in seed money with hopes of growth globally.

Agentech, founded nearly a year ago by Robin Roberson of Oklahoma City and Alex Pezold of Tulsa, offers capabilities to tackle "the labor intensive, subjective and outdated claims process."

The company's AI-driven "ensemble of agents automates the mundane and repetitive tasks typically handled by desk adjusters," allowing carriers to experience a big increase in output without incurring additional labor costs, a news release said.

The funding — from a variety of institutional and individual investors — was announced at Insurtech Connect 2024 last week in Las Vegas, an event for innovation and emerging global technologies in the insurance industry.

About 11,000 people were at the conference, where Roberson and Pezold held a video call with the Tulsa World.

Pezold described Agentech's AI technology as sort of like "Minions" from the "Despicable Me" animated films.

"Think of it as we've created a whole bunch of little Minions that have a very specific task that they complete ... and then we have an orchestrator agent," he said. "Whenever a (insurance) claim is submitted, it comes with sometimes hundreds of pages of documents about the claim ... and what the claims adjudicator has to do is look through all of that data, manually."

Those pages include a ton of data, with policy numbers and details, police reports for auto accidents, home or rental information, and health information for both people and pets, when applicable.

"So what we have created is a way to send all of those hundred pages ... and we crunch through all of those pages and we do it in a matter of seconds, where it takes a claims adjudicator probably around 30 to 45 minutes," Pezold said.

"The Agentech design is just basically saying, 'We've created all these different agents or Minions' ... and it goes through and it constructs a very concise profile of the data the claims adjudicator needs, in order to perform their job."

Nationally, he said, the labor budget for insurance companies is $478 billion.

"We actually have adjustors ... they're like, 'We don't ever want to work without this tool again,'" Roberson said. "And that's been such a validation to hear. If you're spending your time reading 500 pages of reports versus actually helping the policy holder and making good decisions, it's frustrating."

Robertson used to be the executive director of the state's unemployment agency. She said that the younger generation doesn't necessarily want to become insurance adjusters.

"Now, if you give them some cool tools like this, that can change their mind," she said.

While Agentech has offices in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Roberson said the startup is not yet poised to provide services for major insurance carriers.

However, she and Pezold were able to make a presentation at the Las Vegas conference before State Farm.

"We wouldn't want to start, frankly, with a lot of these large carriers," she said. "We do have a strong pipeline already."

Agentech is involved with two claims management systems — Snap Sheet and Click Claims.

"We're super pumped about that," Roberson said, adding, "This is a global product."

Pezold said the seed funding is just the start.

"Now, the name of the game is getting our name out there, finding customers and growing, and kind of evangelizing (that) there's a different way to do business," he said. "We're not trying to replace humans. What we're trying to do is make them far more efficient than what they can be on their own. This is 'How do you scale your business without scaling your cost?' That's kind of the messaging that we're telling people."

Agentech's technology, he said, "works better with humans ... because the (insurance) carriers, they're not interested in firing people — they don't want to. They're interested in controlling costs ... and making their employees' lives better and easier.

"It's a win across the board from a labor standpoint, an employee standpoint and a policy holders' standpoint."

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