AI Is Here: Why Insurance Agencies Can't Afford to Wait
The insurance industry has a complicated relationship with technology — and AI is testing that relationship like nothing before it.
In the season premiere of the Momentum AMP Podcast, host Michael Lebor sits down with insurance agency owner and industry technologist Bradley Flowers and Momentum AMP Co-Founder Kayden Stephens for an unscripted, on-the-ground look at what AI is actually doing to the independent agency world right now.
They cover why legacy agency management systems are in a race against time, what it looks like when an AMS becomes proactive instead of just a digital file cabinet, and why the agents who lean in today are building an advantage that will be very hard to close.
In this episode:
Featured Guest: Bradley Flowers — insurance agency owner, podcast host, and one of the earliest adopters of insuranceagency.ai.
Michael Lebor: By the way, so is this being recorded? Yeah, it is. Dude, go for it. I think that's the funniest thing ever. So just to show you, I guess, how organic it is, here we are clueless, a couple of smart guys in insurance talking about AI. There's no agenda here. There's no premeditated approach or perspective we want to come to. And Bradley, we've been working with you for a long time.
Here's something I think about quite a lot. You know, when they talk about — they, or Brad, I'm sure this happens all the time — like you go to a place, you go to a show and everyone's talking about AI and there's this undertone in the industry, whenever it comes to technology, it's like, InsurTech is not a real thing. There's this instinctual resistance to really recognizing that change is here, change is happening. And I hate the stereotype because there are a percentage of agencies that are very cutting edge and forward thinking and embrace technology. But what is it where the undertone, the narrative is so negative? And when you take something that to me is unimpeachable — the concept that AI is here to stay and AI is going to impact this industry and AI is going to impact what we do.
Do you still feel that narrative? Do you still feel that's the case? Or do you feel like this is different? Do you feel like everybody's gut reaction was to trash it in the beginning because they don't understand it, and they don't understand how it works per se? But I think anybody who dismisses this, or ignores this, will be at their peril.
Do you encounter that? Do you experience that? Like, what do you attribute it to? Or am I just crazy? Because I think about it — like when I want to get up on stage almost and say, guys, you know, if I want to get up and talk about AI, everybody's gonna say, is it real? What's the impact? Like, and we're seeing it. What are you seeing?
Bradley: Yeah, I think you have a couple of things going on. One, there have been — you know, the InsurTech revolution of 2018, 2019, I think, burned a lot of people. Not that InsurTech isn't here to stay and it didn't make an impact. I think it made a huge impact, but I don't think it made as big of an impact as people maybe expected it to. So I think when you have people that — you know, eventually somebody can lie to you so many times you don't trust them. Right. But at the same time, the AI thing — this is happening. Right. And I think I'm actually giving a keynote next week in Arkansas to a group of agents about AI, which I'm sure is going to be challenging. And the very first slide after my intro is:
Let's stop calling it AI and just start calling it the current state of the internet. Like, everybody's added dot AI to their domain. I mean — oh, is it Allbirds? The shoe company pivoted to the AI company and their stock rose like 600%. Right? Like even though there's definitely a level of noise to that, it's here and it's not going anywhere. I also think that you have people — in insurance, I'll tell you a story. So I had a buddy who — and this is my thesis as to why the insurance industry is slow to adopt, right? There's a great book that I've recommended on like a hundred podcasts called Better and Faster. And what it talks about is spotting trends in industries that are ahead of your industry — watching trends so you can predict what's going to happen in your industry. The insurance industry is the perfect industry for that example, right? And in fact, I've invested in some startups in the insurance industry that I know have worked in other industries, and in insurance, it's very easy to make money.
So a buddy of mine was buying an agency not too far from here. And he was like, can I run the numbers by you? I'm like, yeah, sure. He's like, okay, the agency's 30 years old. They're at $280,000 in revenue. So by all accounts on the surface, that agency has failed, right? Or had something catastrophic happen. So I said, okay, what's the EBITDA? He said $230,000. I'm like, no, that can't be right. He's like, no — this guy has a cell phone, an agency management system, and a $500-a-month office. And that's it. And I'm like, this dude crushed it. Like he's living in a low cost of living area and he's making $230,000 a year. But I think that's a part of the greater narrative in that industries, or people, or companies that tend to make a lot of money pretty easily — and you sell a product that is basically mandated that you should buy — it's like, why change? Right.
And I think that in some ways you have to have the attitude of not getting romantic about the way that you've always done it. And that's how you innovate. Right. And I think that's why a lot of the agency management systems out there, a lot of the legacy tech, is not fast to innovate because their customers aren't necessarily complaining about it — because their customers don't know anything different. Right.
And it's very easy to adopt the narrative of, well, that's not going to impact insurance. But we see less agencies operating with file cabinets now than we did five years ago. Right? Whether you think it's going to make an impact or not, it is. And I think what happens when technology enters a space at a grand scale — the A and B players adapt and the C and D players don't. And I don't think that necessarily means the C and D players are going to disappear. There's just going to be less of them. Right. And there's a ton of consolidation now in the agency world and these C and D players are getting bought and it's pitched as a win when in reality it's not. And I think a lot of people are scared to adapt because they're scared they might not be as good as they think they are.
Like I equate this to golf, right? A lot of above average golfers — when they start a round of golf, they get a couple under par in the first few holes and they get scared. And then they almost either consciously or subconsciously self-sabotage to get back down to that number where they're comfortable. It's the same feeling as you're driving down the freeway and a police officer gets behind you. You know how to drive, but all of a sudden you clench the steering wheel a little, you're looking in the rear view mirror, you're very aware. And I think too many insurance agency owners, too many business owners are scared to change, are scared to adapt because it might expose weaknesses that they think they might have that they haven't addressed.
Michael Lebor: It's — I'll go — I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I'll go with the golf analogy. I'm like a 20 handicap on a good day. But I could break 90 if it all comes together for me. And a guy like that, you know, I'm deadly in a tournament because I'm allowed a certain amount of strokes. If I break 90, my team's getting whatever it is, five, six extra strokes. So, you know, let's take that here — if things line up and you're an agent and you put this together, you could be at a distinct advantage.
And I'll say — it's funny — I want to say that I'm embarrassed that I made such an asset of myself the first 60 seconds thinking I'm on your podcast when you're on mine. But listen, that's just pure and honest. I'm happy we're here.
Bradley: You know what — if you know what day it is, you're not busy enough. Like you're an insanely busy guy. Like you probably ran from another meeting to this one. No issues at all. It's hilarious.
Michael Lebor: No, it's more like — it's actually killing my ego. I thought I was like some big shot that I was invited onto your podcast.
Bradley: Well, you do have an open invite. We just haven't lined it up.
Michael Lebor: Yeah, that'll be my excuse. That's what I thought it was. So I want to approach this a little bit differently. And one of the reasons why Kayden is here is because nobody gives a better demo of what we do and what we have than Kayden. And Kayden is one of the parents and authors of just all the awesomeness that we're putting out.
You know, Bradley, you and I have both been on a lot of talking head podcasts and it's great. People like to hear what we have to say, but I want to take this to another level. Kayden, you tell me if this is a good idea or not — and we're live — but be honest. I want to do a hackathon with Bradley. He's — we're very proud of the fact that you're a Momentum customer, you're an ambassador, you're a great advocate for who we are and what we do. And you're one of the first people that actually got visibility and access into insuranceagency.ai and what it is and what it's capable of. And with that perspective — you see a lot and you know a lot and you are a technologist and you are ahead of the curve. And now taking our platform, which is the tool and the instrument to help these agents —
Kayden, you okay with that? Let's pull up Bradley's insuranceagency.ai, or let's pull up a demo and let's start talking about problems in the industry and what could be done and how it works. We could talk about Momentum Claw and I'd love to just talk about some real world examples and let's start talking to the AI and let's add the AI as a fourth participant in this conversation and see how that shapes up.
At the end of the day, that's what everybody wants to know and see — how is this going to change my work life? And I said this on the call and I'll make one point.
The day that I started using Momentum Claw was a day I equated to those videos on YouTube where somebody puts on those glasses and they're colorblind and they could see color for the first time. I am seeing what AI could do. And Brad, audience, please believe me — I have every subscription: Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT — I'm trying every single one of them. And I'm trying NADN and Zapier and trying to connect it all together. And I saw this theoretically, but — I'm not a coder. I don't know Python. I don't know how to do anything with a JavaScript file. I am coding right now. I am building product. And I know that I have access to the world's smartest subject matter expert on every thing imaginable.
And I am leveraging it in Momentum Claw. Momentum has made that available to our insurance agencies as AI agents. And you now have the smartest brain alive on anything you're trying to do with your agency. And we just want to make it available.
One last point I'll make: I think what we're bringing to the table is not just about what's the hot tech of the moment. A big part of what we're doing is protecting agents from the concept of tech de jour. Because the only thing I'm willing to guarantee about AI is that whatever is working hot and in vogue today is not going to be in a year from now. There's going to be something new. And I don't think agents want to be in a position where they have to keep exporting their GPT database to Claude and then from Claude to Momentum Claw and then what's next. We're handling that. We're handling the storage. We're handling the architecture. And we have this crowd and community where, Bradley — if you build something and give us permission, we'll publish it. That all-for-one, one-for-all thing is really taking place.
But Kayden, did you like my idea? You want to pull it open and just talk about what Bradley finds interesting?
Kayden Stephens: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, pretty on the spot. So this is probably going to show how good or bad I am at giving demos when they're on the spot, but let's go ahead. I love it.
Bradley: It's one of those things — while he pulls that up — so that presentation I'm giving in Arkansas, right? A month ago, Claude really became everybody's preferred thing like a month and a half ago. Well, a month ago, they called me about doing this presentation and they were like, hey, we need an outline because we're gonna get this approved for CE. And I said, well, how soon do you need it? Because if I would have given it to you two weeks ago, it'd be irrelevant. I need — what's the latest point I can send this? Because whatever I send you, it's going to be different by the time I get there. You know what I mean? And in fact, I'm putting it together today because everything's moving so fast.
And really, if I could just say something about insuranceagency.ai — management systems, at least in the time that I've been in the industry, were viewed more as like a repository, like a digital file cabinet, so to speak. And I think what you guys have done with this is turned it from a digital file cabinet to something that actively runs your business, prompted and unprompted. And the unprompted is the key, right? It's something that's proactive, not reactive. Which I love.
Michael Lebor: We're trying. And being a solution to insurance agencies means you have to do a lot of things, right? You have to provide the tech, you have to provide the data. Now, you and I both know that most agencies do not have a real true source of truth for all their data, because they use 13, 14 different systems and the data does live in 14 different systems. And I could wax philosophical about this forever, but —
We talk about the three fundamental things that we offer that allow anything to be possible. And I was being a bit of a wise guy — but on the webinar the other day, somebody started saying, can insuranceagency.ai do — and I stopped him. I said, before you ask me what it is, I can tell you the answer is yes. I really do believe it. And I think if it pertains to technology, there is nothing that insuranceagency.ai can't do, because of the fact that we're not just dependent on APIs anymore. These things now are virtual web browsers that can literally go and be like a human who is the best data entry person in the world — and you clone them times a hundred thousand and have them go to any site, pull the data.
Bradley, we've done this. I think you've seen the demo.
Bradley: If your differentiating factor is your walled garden and you only let in the people that kiss the ring, you're going to lose. And I think what happened — and this is not me flattering you guys because you're on here — what happened when you guys launched this is you put every other agency management system on notice. Like, this is the narrative change.
Because now I'm not limited to only integrating with your preferred partners. This whole AI thing has opened things up tremendously. Sort of like how when COVID happened — before COVID, I started my agency a year before it. Insurance carriers, before they appointed me, a lot of them had to come to my office and inspect it. And you couldn't have any remote employees. COVID blew that wide open because the insurance companies made so much money during COVID. They were like, wait a minute — these people are working from home and they're more productive. That's what's going to happen with this. We're going to realize, wait a minute — I don't have to be on this system's preferred vendor partner list. I can make more money doing this, and I can connect two tools together without the two even knowing about it.
Michael Lebor: It's amazing. I mean, we talk about it and — you know, Kayden and I, we're talking about the planning of what we're up to, and Peter and I — we've seen videos that we broadcast three, four years ago talking about the obsidian relational database. I have a video presenting this relational database knowledge graph going back to 2020, 2021. And we saw how the dots were going to connect, everything was going to converge. I didn't envision AI. I didn't know what it was going to be and how it was going to impact everything. But AI is this phenomenon that happened that allows us to take all the foundational elements that we have — and now they've all come together and they work.
So the fact that we can map your data to ours and speak the same language, even though our data headers are different — the fact that we can store all your data in one place — and Bradley, to your point, the fact that two companies that never worked together, if they both are integrated with Momentum, they could be built into an instant workflow without any contract, no NDA, no compliance check, just like you could on Apple.
It's those three things that we've been talking about for years. And AI — trying to give a good analogy — it's like somebody that kind of had something going for a while, had just a piece of real estate set up for years, and all of a sudden Amazon opens up a hub and they had all this infrastructure and they're ready to go because they've just been preparing for something for a long time. We've had these pipes kind of sitting here waiting to go and AI has empowered us to bring it all together.
But do you think — and I want to be very particular, I don't want to mention names, but remember the old Mac versus PC commercials with Justin Long where he could talk about PCs without mentioning anyone by name? Like we do have that luxury of saying the legacy AMS providers, especially the ones that are trying to protect their moat by blocking people out — I think that is a losing proposition. But do you think they're going to try? Because I could program Momentum Claw tomorrow to go into any web base. You could try to block it. Is there going to be a cat and mouse game, or do you think customers are going to win and just say, I want my data and you can't tell me that my agents and digital agents can't log in?
Bradley: The optimistic side of me hopes that they do adapt. But if I'm a betting man, I'm betting there are meetings going on right now on how to stop Momentum Claw from coming into their system. I mean, you go by history, right? And do I think there's going to be a facade that, "we are adapting?" 100%. They're going to get on stages at conferences and announce their new AI tool. But I'm inclined to believe that a lot of that is either just lip service and nothing ever happens, or, yeah, we're going to have AI — but it's going to be like search, right? Especially from a PE-backed group, I just don't see true openness happening.
And especially when you talk about big companies — there's so much red tape to go through. My perception is that the ability for a big company to take less revenue today to prep for the future doesn't happen. Whereas folks like you guys and me and some of the more scrappy startups — it's like, hey, we're really willing to not make money today because we're betting that we're going to be right three years from now.
Kayden Stephens: And that's the main part, Bradley. The fact that you just hit the nail on the head — it's the money they make from the walled garden they've created. We saw it with the open API. If they truly go open, like we are, you lose money on other sides. You can't keep data and it just flows everywhere. So yeah, that's why I don't think it will happen.
Bradley: Yeah. And it's going to take a revolt from the customer to change that. And that kind of goes back to my first point — if everybody's making tons of money and it's a slow burn, nobody's really going to be pushing for it. And typically the people I know who are with some of the big players that push them for AI capabilities are all really, really small agencies. But they're not stuck in their own way, so they kind of see it. And I know the attitude from the other end is like, this is our 30,000th largest customer — why do we care what he thinks?
And that's one thing that's beautiful about you guys: you listen to everybody. Like that was the first thing that attracted me to you. I'm a no-name scratch agency and I can call Kayden and say, hey, I want this feature. And you'll say, okay, we'll build it. Or we'll connect to that company. A good example — when Vertafore bought AgencyZoom, that was within like a six-month timeframe of you guys launching your CRM. If you guys were one of these groups we're talking about, AgencyZoom would have been cut off. They would have seen that as the perfect opportunity to say, our competitor just bought this company — we're not connecting anymore. You're forced to go to our AMS or our CRM. But you don't do that.
Michael Lebor: No, and it's the exact opposite. And it's a shame, it really is. There are a couple of companies that we work with that, yes, I can understand you consider us competitors and we are — but there's so much opportunity to make money together. I'm willing to tell the customer: if you bring me a CRM customer, I'm not going to try to infringe on the AMS space. Let's find ways to work together. Because at the end of the day, the agents benefit. And if three, four, five, ten companies can't figure out how to collaborate and make money together, then shame on us.
Bradley: It's why I hate when newer InsurTechs immediately come out and start attacking all the competition and all the legacy players. Because in order for you to win and in order for the industry to win, you've got to work with everybody. Imagine a world where there's an all-in-one system — there are still going to be outside connectors. You can't serve the entire industry with one all-in-one system. Are there certain agencies that it works for? Yeah, sure. I've got buddies who run their entire agency on HubSpot, but it's an agency in a vacuum where they sell one type of client with one type of carrier and they can make it work. But for the far majority of the industry that wants to grow, you have to have multiple tools.
And the other thing I want to say — I've been beating this drum forever: multiple-entry data is going to be the eventual death of the independent agency. Because I can call any type of other agency to get a quote and they're entering the information one time, even if they're having to enter it at all, and everything populates everywhere else. Whereas a lot of times we're having to go to this system and this system and this system. The AI thing — especially with what you guys are doing, but just AI in general — has completely solved that. If you want it to be solved.
Michael Lebor: Yeah. And growth is not going to come from "I installed AI and my revenue doubled next year." It's going to come from a bunch of 1% improvements, 2% improvements. And one of the things I see getting lined up — I'm not going to put you on the spot and there's no right answer — but if you're an agent out there and you're listening and you're thinking about your business, or if you asked AI and said, "hey, you're a business consultant — what's the one metric, if I only had one metric to choose, to double this year?" Is it the number of phone calls? The number of carriers? How many leads?
What if I could double your hit ratio? What if I could double your line items per business? What if I could automatically quote two additional lines? Or if I could have you simply say to insuranceagency.ai: I'm a Northwest agency — go look at my mix of carriers and my lines of business and compare me to other agencies out there. If WorkComp is my leader, how am I doing compared to the 40 other insuranceagency.ai agencies that have opted in to benchmark data?
We have this think tank group of awesome agencies that are opted in to be part of an AI experiment. It's the opposite of adverse selection, whatever you'd call that. So I have the opposite — cutting edge agencies, working with us, sharing best practices, imagining and building data. And now it's all coming together. And Bradley, what you build tomorrow is now available to everyone else if you so choose. We have a hundred engineers on staff, but I think we're going to put out a hundred times the output of new product in the next 12 months because we now have 30, 40 companies building widgets and features for us. We have agencies that are actually — for the first time — coding their own widgets and building them and putting them into our marketplace and having them live.
Kayden, if you could just show — what's one thing that comes to mind that we didn't have two weeks ago? What's the newest or most interesting thing that somebody showed you and you thought, I've been working on that, thinking about that — but now it's live?
Bradley: We keep going on tangents and Kayden can't do what he's trying to show us.
Kayden Stephens: No, you're good. And I mean, I could even add to the CIP discussion. The exciting thing about the Certified Integration Partner program — the way we pitched it initially was, you build yours, maybe you'll build other people's. And then through conversations it became: well, if this is an open ecosystem, you could technically build your integration and then other companies come to you to integrate yours, and you could also integrate it with us. Can you imagine how fast that would just explode? You essentially have the keys to connect anything you want to connect to. It's pretty insane.
But the one thing that stood out to me recently — and you already mentioned the think tank, Bradley's actually a part of it —
Bradley: I think we have a call today, right?
Kayden Stephens: We do have a call today. So one thing I saw recently that sort of blew my mind is they were creating skills — which we've built, we used to call them AMPs, they're like GPTs or Gems but taken to the next level. And one thing I saw was someone give it instructions to go get information beforehand. So like, go learn about this, go learn about this, and then I'm going to ask you about it. But I'm also going to give you my SOPs. I'm going to give you these documents. Now — AI still has the ability to hallucinate, you have to go a lot further now to get it to do that, but it still does. Imagine being able to focus it to certain items. And what they were doing was they were focusing it to specific websites to learn from, and specific documents — and then it said, ignore the rest.
And the amount of quality I saw come from that skill sort of blew my mind because it was one-to-one every single time they were asking it something. And when we tie that in with the ability to put it into renewal skills, quote proposal skills — that's where it gets powerful because we're using knowledge that never changes and we're allowing it to create data inside the Momentum AMP platform. And you can sort of see right here — we've improved on a ton of things because of this. I've seen agencies that want to be able to add more items. So we just added policies yesterday. So now you can add policies instead of just typing in "insurance." You can literally go to an insured or go to their policy and select it, because again, if we can focus it —
Michael Lebor: So Kayden — I just want to point out one thing. And I'm sorry — I'm apologizing to you, and I'm apologizing to you in front of what I hope is a big audience — I know I drive you crazy because I never let you finish a sentence. I'm sorry. Fireflies could tell me how many times I interrupt you. Occupational hazard.
Kayden, because Bradley has had hours of access to this already and we're jumping right into it — could you just explain the concept that you always talk about? We've redefined UI. Like, people used to complain about the NowSearch UI, and I'll admit it's not the most cutting edge — everything works, which is the most important thing, but we needed a facelift. And rather than taking the old NowSearch and just making it prettier, we've completely scrapped the entire approach to UI. We're taking a chance here — some people might not like it — but the feedback we're getting is like, we've invented a new interface. And I think we've come up with something revolutionary that's going to apply to multiple industries, not just insurance. I've shown this to people and we're already being approached. You have one screen — you theoretically never have to click off of this one screen — and we're bringing everything to you. Kayden, I think it's important to just point that out.
Bradley: Well, and the world is going to chat. We've had this slow process where people are Googling stuff instead of asking their friends. And now we've got ChatGPT, which launched three years ago, so people are used to that chat interface. So this is just the next iteration of our culture. And I think you're definitely going to have people push back — you'll always have people push back — but I think more people are going to like this than not. Because they can just chat with their AMS and say, hey, what's this customer's phone number? What's going on with this policy?
Michael Lebor: And one of the marketing lines we're putting out there — and we're going to pull it off, I'd say within three to four months — is that you will 100% be able to have a fully functional agency management platform without a keyboard. Imagine that. That is coming. I'm not getting rid of the chat bar — don't get me wrong. But in about 90 days — Bradley, do you use Whisper Flow? Do you use any of the voice tools?
Bradley: Yep. Yep.
Michael Lebor: For anyone out there listening who does not use Whisper Flow or a similar tool — send me an email a month after you start using it and say thank you. I know that sounds obnoxious, but I save at least an hour and a half a day. I don't have to type anymore. And I started now talking to different prompts and that's how we're building AI so you could talk to it. So we now have this one platform — Kayden, if I let him, will show that we bring everything to you. Kayden, please keep it going.
Bradley: You said something I want to touch on though — the hundred engineers. I guarantee there are some people listening who in that moment were thinking: he's about to say he's going to let go of 80% of his engineers. But you're not. You're going to make them more productive. And I think that's a key thing, because I've been getting a lot of reach outs from people who are agency employees — even some of my own.
I had a young lady that worked for me who came in the other day and said, are you going to replace some of us with AI? And I said, no — I'm going to replace functions of your job with AI so that you can be more productive. We have a young lady in our office that does a specific function, and we replaced that function with AI. She's still in charge of it, but she's not having to do the manual keyboard task anymore. So she can spend more time interfacing with customers and building relationships, which compounds.
And I think for people listening who are worried about being replaced — I'll tell you a quick story. I worked for a captive company for six and a half years that was nowhere near the cutting edge of technology. And in 2015, 2016, they rolled out Guidewire. That year it was the most expensive insurance technology project of any carrier in the world. And up until that point, anytime we wrote a homeowners policy, we had to do a paper application. We put it in what was called a home office pack. We mailed it to the home office. That application made its way onto an underwriter's desk and it was manually underwritten. Guidewire was going to solve that process — take it away and get things issued quickly.
What some of the underwriters started doing was intentionally moving slower on applications. That way they had a bunch of stuff on their desk, thinking management would think they were more valuable because they were so busy. And that's the opposite of what you should do if you're worried about AI replacing you. You should show how you can be more productive with this. Therefore in turn, make yourself more valuable. And this talk I'm giving in Arkansas — it's actually for CSRs, not agency owners. And my whole pitch to them is: I'm going to show them how we're doing AI, knowing they can't themselves implement a lot of this, but they need to go back to their agency owners and say, hey, I discovered this thing that can save me 80% of my time so I can be more productive for you. We need to do this.
Michael Lebor: So I'm sitting here firing off notes to myself on how to respond to that, because this in itself is a multiple-hour conversation. But I'll share a couple of things that we've got going on in our world as it pertains to jobs, roles, and functions.
Here's what Peter and I said to our CTO, as far as the hundred engineers are concerned. We said, Karam — you have a choice. I need to see one of two results. I need to see either an 80% reduction in the workforce — go from 100 engineers to 20 — or I need to see a 5x return in output.
Nobody's on the chopping block. Nobody has to leave. For any employee of ours who wants to learn AI and pay for a course, I'll pay for it. And I'll tell you what I do at night — maybe I should be embarrassed about the amount of TikTok I watch — but I spend hours on TikTok every night. Most of it is AI-related. And if somebody gets up and gives me a 30-second clip about something AI that's smart, and I click into their profile and they have under 2,000 followers, it means they haven't hit prime time yet. I have a canned message: "Hey, I'm a partner in Momentum AMP. We're trying to revolutionize the insurance agency industry. I see you're at the cutting edge of AI. If you want to be a part of this community, please reach out to me." I send it out about four or five times a night. And some of the best things we have in insuranceagency.ai and in Momentum are from freelancers we found that way, because we have this framework they can easily plug into and they're building content.
So now let's go to the insurance agent. There are going to be people employed today in the insurance industry where AI is going to replace what they do. I like how you framed it — we're not replacing jobs, we're replacing functions — and that is going to change things. Now, for agency owners, one of the things — it's not the sexiest part of what Momentum is — but we're a community. We have a marketplace of third party companies that are fully integrated with us. And if you're an agency and you say, hey, I use such-and-such company for my portal — would you work with them? Sure. Bring them, have them connect and set up, and they could be live in a month.
But for the CSRs — if they're listening and they're AI-forward and they build a workflow — let them come publish it on insuranceagency.ai and make money. If you go out and build a game, like the guy who built Candy Crush is a very rich person. They didn't own Apple. They didn't own the distribution. They were part of a community.
We have our first cohort of our CIP — our Certified Integration Partner Program. Kayden, Steve Anderson, Alex on our team — we have five integration companies that are becoming certified on how to connect agents to third-party partners on our platform. But we have about 50, 60 InsurTechs on a waiting list. We're doing it right now, just a small batch to test it out. But we have this army of third-party contributors that want to connect via MCP or build agents, skills, and widgets. Kayden, click into the marketplace for a minute.
Kayden Stephens: No, you're good. And I could add to the CIP — the exciting thing about the way we pitched it was initially like, you build yours, maybe you'll build other people's. And then through conversations it became: if this is an open ecosystem, you could technically build your integration and then other companies come to you to integrate yours, and you could integrate it with us. Can you imagine how fast that would just explode? You essentially have the keys to connect anything you want to connect to. It's pretty insane.
Bradley: And that's the biggest thing I think has slowed InsurTech down up to this point. There would be some cool InsurTech, right? And you would buy it to solve a problem, but it would create what I call a whack-a-mole problem — you solve this problem, but now this other one popped up over here because the tools didn't necessarily talk to each other. Now that's out the window. So I think everything we've seen in InsurTech — it's been very slow — is about to accelerate a ton.
Michael Lebor: Yeah. So Kayden, what's one example of something that you've done with Bradley? Like, Bradley — what was the ask that you submitted to Kayden? It was something you texted me, on your wishlist.
Bradley: It was basically the ability to upload policies and have them go into the system for carriers that don't download. Which is a huge one.
Kayden Stephens: Yeah. Because you saw the commission statement piece, right? Where we were taking it and putting it into the XML — treating it as if it was a download, a direct bill download — because then we had every step after. And then you had the smart idea to basically take the documents and then convert them to an AL3 and put it in, because the same effect — we had all of the merging happening. So we've actually started that. We have a working prototype of that. And we've also improved our — we've actually been looking at the JSONs of what data comes from the extraction, which is going to make importing the items so much easier because we're importing sections rather than trying to import the whole item. It's so exciting.
Bradley: So — when Kayden showed me that — probably 60 to 70% of our carriers don't download, and probably 50% of the ones that do download don't download commissions because they have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a certain company to get that to work. And so I have a bookkeeping company whose main job is to reconcile commissions for me. My assistant collects all the commission statements every month, has a checklist, then sends them to the accounting company, and they charge me hourly. They essentially just manually reconcile everything. And Kayden showed me where you can just upload a commission statement — regardless of the format — it pushes it in as an AL3, and it's done. And I called my accounting company — I'm like, look, I don't know how much you're charging me hourly to do this, but I bet it's more than 25 cents, which is what this costs. I want you to use this now.
Kayden Stephens: Yeah, no, it's insane. And that's just due to feedback. I remember when Peter came up with this idea — it was from just feedback from an agency, sort of like everything else we do. Pretty crazy.
Bradley: But it's crazy that — I love the folks at IVANS. I love IVANS. But we've got to get more innovative with the way that data gets into our systems. And they know that — I've had that conversation with them.
Kayden Stephens: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they know that.
Michael Lebor: I think that's one of those things. You take companies like Canopy Connect and Adapt API — both CEOs I know personally, both visionaries and ahead of the curve. I said it often — like a year or two ago, somebody asked me, if you could pick any InsurTech company, who would you invest in? Canopy Connect was one of my answers. But I haven't spoken to them recently, and I'm curious how they're adapting to AI — which I'm sure they are, because Toga is amazing. But what's the existential impact of AI where I can now go into Momentum Claw and say, hey, log into my Hartford portal and scrape every piece of data — and have it formatted in a minute? I'm curious to see how those companies adapt.
Now, we're integrated with a number of them, because I don't want to have to do the work they've already done. I'd love to use their integration. But I'm sure a lot of our customers — somebody could go in right now to Momentum Claw and say, go to my carrier portal and start scraping it, and it'll do it. There is no regulator on this. That's why we want agents who are going to — little caveat emptor, buyer beware. No lifeguard on duty. That's why we're doing this in a controlled fashion. Trust me — I would have loved to have just released this on April 1st to anyone who signs up. I think we would have had 5,000 agencies sign up on the first day.
Bradley: You definitely have to be careful. There's a rumor going around now that there was an agent that Progressive pulled their contract because they did like a thousand quotes in like 20 minutes with some AI tool. And you can't be reckless. Just like with VAs — you have to spot check.
Michael Lebor: So there's a rumor — do you know who this happened to or you just heard it?
Bradley: It's just a rumor. The person who told me knew the person. So take that for what it's worth. I'd love to interview him on the podcast.
Michael Lebor: Okay, yes — that's where I was going to go.
Kayden Stephens: It doesn't surprise me, because I've seen some things in this industry already. I'm not cynical about AI, but more cautious. I've seen some things where it's giving power to people who don't understand the complexities of a backend system. And you can go in and tell these AIs to create a quoting platform that does all this stuff behind the scenes — but there are so many vulnerabilities. I could definitely see things like that happening.
Bradley: And that's where doing it through you guys — where you have that layer of, hey, we're Momentum AMP, we're an InsurTech — versus just building it on your own, that matters. And that's where this buy versus build discussion comes in. My attitude toward that is: I don't replace any tools with stuff that I build. I build add-ons. I build stuff that makes my life easier, not stuff that replaces what's already there. I let the companies I've chosen handle those core functions.
There are people out there talking about building their own AMS with Claude. Don't do that. Build a function that can add on and layer onto your AMS — sure, all day long. But some of the fodder out there — like, be careful who you listen to and who you take your advice from. There are people who are very negative on AI, sharing nothing but horror stories. If you peel back one layer of the onion, you'll often find this person owns a SaaS company that's very threatened by AI. There's always a reason. When you can see it, it's almost funny. It's like, they don't like this because somebody could replicate what they do pretty easily.
Kayden Stephens: Or they're just afraid.
Kayden Stephens: Yeah — I just ran into this the other day. I was helping an agency — super nice people — but they were afraid of AI because of the horror stories, the idea that something bad can happen. But then they were showing me how they had a tool for document extraction that could import into another system they use. And I was like, just so you guys know — this is AI. Just because it doesn't look like a chat interface, it's still AI. And it blew their mind because they were like, this is what increased our workflow 10X. I'm like, yeah — it's still AI. Pretty funny.
Bradley: Yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. When I was captive, I had a customer who had a life insurance policy with me and they had moved to another state. They needed to do a beneficiary change. So I DocuSigned them the form — and it got declined, because this company would not allow you to send life insurance documents via DocuSign. And I said, okay, what do you consider the alternative? They said, just send it to them in the mail.
I'm like — wait a minute. This service shows the IP address, the timestamp, the email, the two-factor authentication that verifies this is this person — but you're going to let me send it in the mail with no idea who signs it? And I went on this crusade for like six months fighting this. I don't know if you guys watch King of the Hill, but it was almost like Hank Hill when they wouldn't let him have his toilet. He got on the city council just so he could — and then he resigned. Like, I was on a mission.
But now at that company, people can get life insurance documents signed through DocuSign, because I was a hard head about it. And it's like — people will trade privacy for convenience in a heartbeat. Like I was very skeptical of putting stuff in ChatGPT. Now Claude is so functional, I don't even hesitate. I'm like, if something happens, it happens.
Michael Lebor: I have completely leaned into it to the point where I'm about to give Momentum Claw a thousand-dollar prepaid Visa card to go start making money performing certain functions. I gave it the idea, gave it the code — it built the website. It's crazy.
One last thought I want to share — one of the marketing themes of what we're providing is: we're creating your digital twin and we're hosting it and managing it for you. I learned yesterday about AI and how they have soul.md files. Do you guys know about this? Where Momentum Claw has a soul — a consciousness — and there are files that go toward that consciousness, there are dream files. It's actually fascinating. We originally started calling it RAG — your kind of memory as a service that we're going to host. And now it's also your second brain, your clone.
So Kayden — maybe Bradley, if he wants — I'm doing this myself: my AI is on every Fireflies call that I have. It has every meeting transcript I've had for the past year. After uploading it, I said, I want you to tell me the 10 most interesting things about myself as an executive and help me improve. And the feedback it gave me was spot on, because it had listened to hundreds of hours of my actual calls.
Now we're going to be able to power insuranceagency.ai to listen to your calls with your employees, with your customers — save them. Not everybody's going to want to share that data with us, but our data shows that 20 to 30% minimum will. And we will create a Bradley Flowers brain that will answer questions the way you would. You could choose to have messages drafted for your approval before you hit send. We're wrapping this in a bow and saying: we're going to future proof this for you. When the next best thing comes, we can easily plug into it. We're going to keep all your rules, maintain all your SOPs, have it perform functions correctly. But it's also going to be able to think like you, have your memory, constantly listen to every call, and say — what would Bradley do in this situation? You could be flagged in real time.
Anyway, Bradley — if that's interesting to you, I'd love you to participate in that. But I want to recognize we're already five minutes past. Again, funny way to start the meeting. Bradley, I'll put you on the spot and let you close things out.
Bradley: Guys, I think that — and I've already said this once — you drew the line in the sand for other agency management systems. And if you're listening to this and you're not on Momentum AMP, you're probably going to be behind very soon.
Michael Lebor: Can't ask for a better person with a better message. Bradley, thank you. I know this is an overused term, but we genuinely appreciate you. I remember when I first heard, "Bradley Flowers uses Momentum AMP." That meant something. And we're excited to keep you and your audience and our users completely aware and armed for this revolution that we're hoping to facilitate.
Bradley: Alright, appreciate it guys.
Kayden Stephens: Yeah, thanks so much.
Michael Lebor: Thank you.