AI Isn’t the Grim Reaper of Insurance — It’s Just a New Tool

(Please note that this content has not been produced by A.I.)

As long as the folks who stand poised to profit from AI's prophesied "job-a-geddon" are using AI to "write" viral posts predicting and cheering it on, it is only fair that the "dead man walking" insurance agent/attorney should get his say as well.

Will AI make insurance agents obsolete the way it purports to make attorneys, financial advisors, data analysts, software engineers, and most customer service jobs disappear? If your idea of "quality service" is to hear fake clicking sounds that create the illusion that the bot you are prompting is actually typing 🤖, then YES, AI will doom that level of service. Good riddance. As my dad used to remind me, there is no shortage of insurance agents. So, odds are that the herd will be culled of some really poorly performing insurance agents. No one is sweating through their eyeballs over this outcome. I suspect the same thing will be true in these other white collars areas. There will be some culling that probably needed to happen. When was the last time you heard someone complain about the shortage of attorneys? I won't hold my breath waiting for that.

Personally, I am eager to see what AI can do to make a variety of tasks that our customer never see us perform a lot more efficient and timely. I am expecting that a lot of the software I currently pay significant fees to use may be replaced or greatly enhanced by AI. In short, I expect to be able to do more with less. If I were a nationwide or international broker with an untold number of redundancies, multiple offices, and a swollen payroll, I might feel differently or maybe eager for the cutting to begin. So too, if I were a nationwide law firm with hundreds or thousands of associate attorneys to support, this might look a little like a coming freight train 🚂. My first impression is that AI is going to help the smaller, leaner firms compete for business that used to only be for the big dogs.

These doomsday scenarios never seem to consider how and why people decide to enter into business relationships with each other. Character, trust, integrity, and loyalty are intangibles that go into every client relationship ❤️. If those elements are not front and center, then you will only have short term (i.e., transactional) customer relationships. If AI doesn't scoop them up, the thing that comes after AI certainly will.

So forgive me if I don't join the headless chicken dance over AI. My plan is to use it as a tool to make our firm better, and NEVER FORGET what GOOD SERVICE demands.