ReSource Pro’s Agency Tech Blueprint research, published in June 2026, found that 98% of insurance agencies are planning AI investments this year. That’s basically everyone. The problem is that “AI” has become such a broad label that it covers everything from a chatbot on your website to a system that reads your calls and writes your AMS notes for you. Those are not the same thing, they don’t cost the same thing, and they definitely don’t deliver the same results.
This is what we’re seeing independent agencies actually spend money on right now, and whether it’s worth it.
AI for answering phones
This is the category growing fastest in insurance, and it’s where we work, so full disclosure up front.
AI phone systems answer your agency’s calls, figure out what the caller needs, and either handle the request or transfer to the right person on your team. The good ones connect to your AMS so they know who’s calling before they pick up.
A few names you’ll run into:
InsuraMate AI (that’s us) handles calls, texts, and emails in 85 languages, pushes transcripts and documentation into supported AMS and CRM systems (our live list is on /integrations/ — ask where yours stands), and handles post-call workflows like COI prep and team notifications. Per-seat pricing so your bill doesn’t change when call volume spikes. We’re biased, obviously.
Sonant AI focuses on inbound call answering plus a separate post-call analysis product that scores your team’s phone conversations and flags missed cross-sell opportunities. Their post-call product is genuinely different from what most competitors offer.
Allo built their whole product around AMS360 integration. If your agency runs on AMS360 and native integration is the single most important thing to you, they’re worth a look. Ask them for live call samples on your own call types — the same thing you should ask us.
Super Agent and AgentZap are newer entrants targeting small agencies. Check AMS coverage with them directly — the space moves fast and published integration lists go stale quickly.
What actually matters when you’re choosing: Don’t pick based on the demo call. Every AI voice sounds fine on a scripted demo. Ask the vendor to run 20 real calls through your system and look at what lands in your AMS afterward. If someone on your team still has to clean up the notes or retype a policy number, you haven’t saved any time. You’ve just added a step.
AI features already in your AMS
This is the category most agencies overlook because they’re already paying for it.
EZLynx rolled out two features worth knowing about. EVA AutoFill lets you upload a document or even a voice recording and the AI extracts the data and fills out an application automatically. EZLynx says that can cut quoting prep from about fifteen minutes to under a minute. Ask EVA is their question-answering tool that pulls from your agency’s own data. EZLynx claims these features could save agents up to three hours a day by end of 2026.
Applied Epic added document AI that extracts data from dec pages, applications, and certificates automatically. If your team is manually retyping information from carrier documents into Epic, this alone might be worth looking at.
HawkSoft is lighter on AI features than the other two but has solid automation for renewal reminders, certificate issuance, and client communication workflows. Not flashy, but the basics done well.
The catch: AMS vendors are adding AI features fast, but they’re optimizing for their own ecosystem. The AI works great inside the AMS but doesn’t extend to your phone system, your email, or your text messages. That’s where a dedicated tool fills the gap.
AI for documents and certificates
If your agency handles commercial lines, COI requests eat hours every week. A mid-size commercial book generates 20 to 100 COI requests per week, each taking 5 to 30 minutes depending on complexity.
AI document tools automate this by reading the incoming request, matching it to the right customer and policy in your AMS, generating the certificate, and sending it back. The ones built for insurance know what an additional insured endorsement looks like. The generic document tools don’t.
We built Otto Agent for this workflow. It reads your shared mailbox, identifies COI requests, and handles them end to end. Same-day-expiring policies get routed to your team for manual review because those are too risky for full automation.
Other tools in this space include general document AI platforms, but they need significant setup because they aren’t trained on insurance documents out of the box. If you’re only doing personal lines, this category probably isn’t where your money should go first.
ChatGPT, Claude, and the free stuff
Most agency owners don’t realize how much they can get from general AI tools without spending anything.
Where general AI actually helps:
- Drafting client emails that don’t sound like they were written at 11pm
- Summarizing 40-page carrier documents or endorsement language
- Writing social media posts about your agency
- Comparing policy language across carriers
- Answering “what does this exclusion actually mean” questions for your own understanding
Where it falls apart:
- Anything requiring access to your AMS (general AI can’t read your systems)
- Giving coverage advice to clients (the AI will sometimes get it confidently wrong, and wrong coverage advice has E&O consequences)
- Any workflow that needs to be logged and tracked in your AMS
General AI is a solid productivity tool for your team’s day to day. It is not a replacement for insurance-specific AI that connects to your systems and handles workflows end to end, and a prompt that works on one screen is not a system a team can run on.
What to watch out for
A few red flags we’ve seen agencies run into:
“We integrate with everything.” Ask specifically which AMS systems they have live deployments on. If the answer is “we use Zapier” for your AMS, that’s not native integration. That’s a workaround, and workarounds break when you need them most.
No number by the end of the first call. Plenty of vendors here quote per agency rather than publishing a rate card, us included — team size and AMS move the number too much for a website price to mean anything. That part is fine. What is not fine is leaving the first call without a written number. If a vendor stalls past that, ask why.
Pilot programs with no data. If a vendor says “try it for 30 days” but doesn’t give you a dashboard showing exactly what happened during those 30 days, the pilot is useless. You need call volume, handle rate, documentation accuracy, and time saved. Numbers, not feelings.
“AI-powered” labels on basic automation. Sending an automated email when a renewal is 30 days out is not AI. That’s a scheduled task your AMS can already do. Real AI reads, understands context, makes decisions, and acts on things it hasn’t seen before. If the tool can only follow a pre-written script, it’s automation with a marketing budget.
The honest part
We sell one of the tools on this list. We tried to be fair about the others, but you should absolutely do your own research and talk to agencies that are running whatever you’re considering. Ask for references from agencies your size. Call those references and ask what broke during the first month, not what works now.
The AI tools worth paying for in 2026 are the ones that connect to your existing systems, handle real insurance workflows without someone babysitting them, and give you data showing what they actually did. Everything else is a demo that looks impressive and a monthly bill that doesn’t pay for itself.
If you want to see where InsuraMate fits in your stack, book a 15-minute call. We’ll walk through your current workflows and tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit or whether one of the other tools makes more sense for your setup.
Georgijus Korobkovas
Founder & CEO