What Otto refuses to do.
Every AI vendor will show you what their product can do. Here is what ours will not, because for a certificate that is the more useful half of the answer.
Better unissued than wrong.
A certificate that goes out wrong does not announce itself. It sits quietly on a job site or in a compliance folder until the day it matters, and by then it is your errors and omissions problem, not the requester's. So Otto is built to stop rather than to guess, and the number of requests it declines is not a failure rate. It is the product working.
Otto is the worker that handles certificate requests arriving in your service inbox. It issues standard certificates end to end, including VIN schedules. Everything else routes to a person with the original request attached and the reason stated.
Named, every time, on the record.
Your dashboard shows the reason on each declined request, so nobody has to guess why something landed back on their desk.
The request asks for language Otto was not given authority over.
Additional insureds, waivers of subrogation, primary and non-contributory, anything that changes what the certificate actually says. Otto issues to the holder named in the request and does not touch coverage language. A request that needs wording goes to a licensed person with the original email attached.
Something Otto needs is not in the request, and it will not assume.
No holder address, an ambiguous named insured, a policy that could be one of two on the account. The tempting move is to pick the likeliest one. Otto does not pick. It stops and asks your team, because a certificate issued against the wrong policy is a problem that surfaces months later.
The request came in a form Otto cannot read reliably.
A photographed form, a portal that needs a login, a requirement buried in a contract PDF. Otto does not guess at a document it cannot parse cleanly. It routes the whole thing through with a note about what it could not read.
This certificate already went out recently.
Requesters chase, and the same request often arrives twice from two people at the same company. Otto recognizes it and stops rather than sending a second certificate that makes your agency look disorganized to the holder.
Figures from our own demo workspace, not a customer's, and not the whole population: requests that needed no action are counted elsewhere. The volumes are modeled on a live agency rather than taken from one, because another agency's certificate traffic is not ours to publish and yours will not be either. Every agency's mix comes out different: a trucking book throws far more VIN schedules and far more special wording than a personal lines book does.
A declined request is not a dropped one.
It stops before acting
Nothing is sent, nothing is written back to the client file, and no partial certificate exists anywhere.
It hands over the whole context
The original request, what Otto understood, what it could not resolve, and which of the four reasons applied.
It stays on the record
The decline is logged with its reason, so the requests your team handles by hand are countable rather than invisible.
Six things Otto will not do, by design.
You stay issuer of record.
Your license and your judgment stay in charge of every certificate that leaves the building. Otto operates inside the authority you give it and nowhere else.
Certificates come from your AMS, never from a conversation.
Otto generates from the policy data on the client file. Nothing a caller asserted on the phone becomes a fact on a certificate.
It drafts email replies. It does not send them.
Routine replies arrive in your queue written and ready. A person approves every one. There is no setting that makes Otto send mail on its own.
It captures a quote request. It does not quote.
A caller asking for a price gets their details taken properly and handed to a licensed producer. Otto never states a premium and never binds.
It detects a claim and routes it.
A caller reporting a loss is recognized and sent to the right person fast, with the call summarized. Otto does not take claim details and does not decide anything about the claim.
Written intake by design.
Certificate requests arrive as documents, and the document is the audit trail. When someone asks in nine months why a certificate went out, the answer is a file, not a recollection.
What you set, and what you cannot.
The four reasons above are not settings. Special wording, missing fields, unreadable payloads and duplicates always go to a person, in every deployment, whatever your confidence in the system. What you do set is who they reach, in what order, and how fast you hear about it.
Most agencies start in shadow mode, where Otto processes real requests and issues nothing at all, so you see exactly what it would have done before it does anything.
See it decline something.
Fifteen minutes. Send it a request it should refuse and watch where the request lands.