Episode 291: AI Coworkers for Your Agency with Vishal Rohra

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromsol.

Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. I want to start with the story on this episode. I was privileged to go speak to a group of independent insurance agents a couple of months ago, and they had the opportunity to learn more about what's going on with automation, technology, AI and the such during that event. So after I got done delivering the keynote, I like to hang around and learn. And so I'm sitting in the audience and they brought up about 5 of their partners. This association brought up 5 of their partners who are doing great things in automation, technology, AI, and the advancement of IT and using it in agencies. I'm just sitting there observing everything that these guys are saying on stage. And there's this one guy that comes up on stage, his name is Vishal. And I'm listening to Vishal, and he says, how many of you have bots? Now, keep in mind, this event, there's about 700 people in the audience. Okay, so how many people know what bots are? You know, got some hands in the air. And he goes, how many people here are using bots in their agency? Maybe five, ten hands, tops. Hands went up. And he said, and this is the thing that got me. He goes, well, I'm here to tell you today that if you built a bot in your agency, your bots are outdated.

And I think as soon as I picked up my chin and closed my mouth, I was like, holy Toledo, we bought. I mean, I talked to a lot of independent insurance agents, and there aren't too many that are using that kind of technology in their agency. And those that are. For him to say that, that's huge. And so I have gone to the man that said that we built a relationship. I am privileged and honored to have Vishal from K AI on the podcast today. Hey, Vishal.

Hey. Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for that lovely intro. And that was actually one of the first conferences where we presented K and what we are building. And I would love to chat with you and tell you more about how bots are outdated.

Yeah, yeah. So they've taken it to another level, and I'm going To leave that to Vishal to share. Today I was actually able to catch up with him. He's in another part of the world, so he's tough to track down sometimes, but I don't give up. So anyway, thank you for jumping on from the aloha area and taking time today to share. So let's dig into it. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what is K AI and most importantly, why are you doing this? For independent insurance agents to help them and their businesses.

Yeah. So before even the company, I have a machine learning background. I have basically from graduation worked at a range of big tech companies and worked at companies like Microsoft and Twitter. My co founder worked at companies like Amazon and a couple of other AI startups. And I got into this space one because when we left our companies we realized we are at an inflection point for how large language models are going to change lot of things around our Worlds. We remember ChatGPT when it came out in 2023, we remember getting really excited about all the possibilities that come with it. But when we jumped in and finally started a company, what we are building with K has basically been coming from a thesis of operations in every single industry is going to fundamentally change. And operations basically is work that is repetitive. There's a lot of work across the space which is just doing double data entry work across multiple different websites, doing things that take up a lot of paperwork, things that take up a lot of time, that things people don't really want to do anymore. And when we joined the space of insurance, it was clear to us that the delta for operational efficiency was way higher in insurance than every other personnel that we talked to. And there's a range of reasons that we can dive into of why that happened. But what K is and what we are building with K is as you mentioned, the next generation of bots. But they are next generation enough that we call them AI coworkers. And we are essentially building AI coworkers that learn and adapt your processes and then join your team just like your coworkers do. They train from your existing material, they learn your repetitive processes and then take away all the tasks that you would rather not do and focus on things like building relationships within independent agencies, doing all the client service work that really matters and put away all the work that you have to do in carriers and AMS systems and give that to a coworker that can learn like you.

I love that term, AI coworkers. And that plays right into what I saw and heard. And one of the things that's unique about Kay. And let's dig into this really quickly and then we're going to do something that people seem to love on the podcast. We're going to jump into a quick video that Vishal and his team created and you'll learn from that. And if you are on the video podcast version of the podcast, you can watch it there. And if you need to look at that later, you can always just go to YouTube and then search Unstoppable Profit Producer. Click on the videos and all of our podcasts are there and you can watch this as well as a follow up. But your.

Technology, Vishal and AI and bots and all that, they have the ability. Because what I learned about bots a couple of years ago from a lot of my independent insurance agency buddies who are using them in the agency, they've got to build them and program them. Right?

That was the bot of the legacy technologies. Right. I think we are at is there's a few things that fundamentally changed and I think that's what we were discussing at the conference. One, RPA or bots of the past would require a lot of onboarding time for any website that they had to work with. So let's say you're working with 10 of your top market carriers. It would require them to hard code every single website and anticipate that every single page is going to be the same. And whenever the website changes, the bot breaks down. The reason large language models are able to change that is you don't need to hard code anything. You are reasoning through things. You are looking into websites and reasoning through what's in front of you and be able to answer and do the actions that you would generally do. And the second thing that changed is your process is not the same every single day. Your processes change, your underwriting questions change anything that you would have trained a bot to do. Your websites and processes change. And now because of the reasoning abilities that bots have, you can adapt to those processes. You can learn from those processes. It's not a new build that you're giving to a programmer and changing things over time. There's something that happens instantaneously and those are the power of like new bots, which is learning and adapting fast and being able to onboard to a range of websites quickly.

That's what I heard and I learned and I'm like that's awesome because I mean look, we've all got how many things going on every single day. And the last thing that who loves dealing with technology and when it doesn't work right. And it needs to be fixed and it needs to be updated and all that. Like this, right, everybody? No, so Matt's. And they figured that out and so that's why I love what Vishal and his team are doing and I wanted to get him on to explain this a little bit. So that's my terminology. RPAs, robotic process automation. But you had, you have, you have the automatic RPAs now, right?

Basically, Yeah, I think that's definitely one way to say it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So automatic rpa, AI co workers. All right, so now we're getting into some terms that we can all deal with here. So you have the ability. And by the way, let me say this, I'll say this a couple of times because, you know, if you want to hear from real agents who have actually, you know, started working with Vishal and his team and have something to say, their website is simply K A Y A I. That's kingalphayellow.com AI so just go to K AI. I'm looking at it on my other screens here. It's got agents on there and they share their experiences with K AI so you can check that out there. But one of the things. And you can get a free demo there. But Vishal has some information for us he's going to share right here live. Before you jump to that, anything to add Vishal or you want to get right to it?

I think as you jump on that website, one thing that we did very different this time is instead of showing the product, the first thing you will see is testimonials from our customers. And all our early users sat with us for 10, 15 minutes talking about how their experience with Kay has been. And I would love for you guys to check out the website and see in life what they talk about us.

Yeah, cool. Fantastic. So he's going to share a bit of an overview of K AI. So take it away, Vishal.

Yes. When you jump on that website you will have access.

Insurance agencies and brokers spend half their time filling out forms.

In the 80s it was a stack.

Of paperwork and now we're filling out the same forms but across hundreds of carrier portals. It doesn't make sense. Today we are excited to launch an AI co worker that does the data entry work for you. Let's see how it works. Say your producer gets a new client looking for an auto policy. First, Kay can process all sorts of documents. Accords, loss runs, SOVs right out of the box, all fine tuned for insurance.

Second, it works with Your existing systems. You can just forward that email and Kay will get to work here. It's going to quote from two different carriers with your preferences in mind. Behind the scenes, you can use our app to see how it works. You can see Kay has picked up the new application. It has processed the driver's license and policy page and is ready to start quoting. Now the real magic begins. Kay has logged into Roadshow Insurance. We'll go through every single page and do what it takes to get you an accurate quote. It can answer a range of underwriting questions, from business classification to property data. It'll navigate old clunky websites, download documents, and really just get the job done. This is all powered by a reasoning engine that learns and adapts, just like your teammate. We have already trained it to navigate a range of carriers, AMS and CRM tools. And when it's done, the quotes come right back to your inbox. You'll have a summary of the premiums and a recording of how it was done. And this was just an auto code. You can hire K to process complex commercial lines, serve certificates, download carrier docs, fill up your ams, or do anything that your team would rather not do. Kay is designed to be your star employee. Visit K AI and let's start training your AI workforce.

Insurance agencies and brokers spend half their.

That was awesome. Thank you, Vishal.

Thank you. I think this is just us scratching the surface of what's possible, but I hope this gives you a good picture of what a coworker really means, because I think that's what we invest a bunch in, which is saying, hey, this is not another software tool. There's not one more software tool that you have to train your producers on, have your producers adapt to. And then that software tool requires two more software tools. Over here, the coworker works with their existing software. And I think there's a lot of things that we play around with and see what that looks like.

Yeah. And I love that term, AI co workers. It's another teammate.

Yeah.

And that's a great way to think about it. But the first question that came to my mind as I was watching that, do you have agencies that you work with right now that have multiple AI co workers?

Yes. So I think one, we have not as much position this as multiple co workers, but the same coworker can do multiple workflows. So we start with, let's say, personal line renewals. Then we go to commercial new business. Then we go to carrier book roles, we go to ams, Accord form generation for access markets, those are a range of workflows that we pick up one separate event. Right.

And just to reiterate, I asked Vishal before we started if the. I didn't know the terminology AI co workers, but now I do, the AI coworkers could handle personal lines, commercial lines, et cetera. And you said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So anyway, so it can help with all areas. This is a harder question, but if you don't know the answer, that's fine. What about like farm insurance? Because we have.

I have. I've had a client who has picked up farm insurance to us. We don't shy away from any type of line of business or a line of carrier. I have had people who have basically had only regional carriers and I onboarded that agency with their three top markets in two weeks. So we have the ability to really onboard to a range of lines of businesses as well as the types of businesses that they serve. And the reason is simple. When you train a coworker, how do you train them? You just sit down with them, give them a demo video of how you go about doing things. You create an instruction set, you create a training manual. Just give that to us. We will pick it from there. I think think of this as really hiring another CSR or a virtual assistant or an account manager who's doing a lot of your quoting and submissions work.

Yeah, yeah. And just for everybody out there who's either watching or listening this year, I am passionately adamant about making sure that we bring all of the technology and all the automation and all of the AI tools available to independent insurance agents to the table. Not just Vishal, but I've got lots of others are going to be coming. We started a couple of weeks ago with one of our agents, Rob Bowen, who talked about a lot of this kind of stuff. We're going to keep bringing it the entire year because it's been my observation and I think in conversations with Vishal, he's experiencing the same thing. No disrespect to you agents out there, we love you guys. I am one of you. But we're behind and we need to stay up with the automation technology and the AI advancements because like Will Rogers said, if you just sit there, you're going to get run over and left behind. So we don't want that for any of you. That's why I'm bringing people like Vishal and I'm going to keep bringing lots of others who have these abilities to the table. So AI co workers, you know, one of the Topics that we're talking about today. So it can handle personal lines, commercial lines. Talk about the onboarding process when you start working with an agent, what's that look like?

Yes, my focus is, and I think that's also where RPA broke in the past. I want to get something up and running within two weeks, and I've consistently done that for all our customers. So we won't get the whole workflow end to end, be fully automated within two weeks. But what we will do is find out one scope of that workflow that's taking the most amount of your time. Let's say you're a personal line agency, you're doing renewals, you're doing auto renewals more than any other type of line of business. I've seen a lot of. Virtually everybody's reshopping auto at a lot of different states. So when we come in, we say, all right, let me work with a competitive rater, your top three carriers that you're bridging into, and we'll get that up and running. Just send us a task. Let's say an auto renewal and we go through a competitive rater, go into your top three bridging markets, and then we do that work end to end. And then over time, we have seen basically expand to multiple different carriers from 3 to 15. Then being able to say, hey, let me increase the scope of the workflow. Let me pick this up not just through email. Let me pick this up from your CRM system, your applied activities. Let me bring this back as a proposal as opposed to a summary, because eventually, what are you going to do with this? You're going to create a proposal. So that's how we essentially, like, walk before you run, get something up and running within like two weeks and then keep adding more things.

I don't know if you guys are excited. I'm excited just listening to this and where my mind is going. It just got off with an agent in a Midwestern insurance agency in a coaching session. They have more than 20 people on their team. They have a sales team. And I'm thinking about two new producers they're looking to bring on. Because one of the things that I'm thinking about, yes, the renewals are vitally, vitally important. That's the wealth of an agency. But imagine setting up your production team anytime that they get on the phone with somebody or they can say to somebody, hey, if you don't have time right now, how about we get our coworker involved and they will follow you to grab the information and they'll keep reminding you however you want to be reminded, whether it be phone, email, or text. And we'll just keep reminding you until you have time to get us the info we need so we can get that done, and then we will. And then we can have the AI coworker on the back end doing all of this and getting the quota done. And then the salesperson comes in and says, because those producers or salespeople, as an example, they need to invest 95% of their time talking to people about their insurance program. And then the AI coworker will bring it back to their inbox and say, all right, everything's ready. Take it away. Is that possible?

Yes. That's how we have seen people praise our product as well. There were times where we implemented a certificate of insurance workflow and the person was running late to another meeting and they needed to get the COI right away. They were just starting to work with us. They sent out the coi. By the time they reached the customer, they had COI in their inbox. And at that moment they're like, okay, this is the power of a coworker. They didn't have to hire one more team member here. They didn't have to do that repetitive data entry work. They just, like give that away to a co worker. And we might actually started with commercial new business, so we have the ability to handle a lot more nuances. We started from your BOB policies, your GL, your commercial auto with 50 different trucking units, and we were able to handle a bunch of those things. And over time, it's just clear that this is here to stay.

Wow.

Amazing. What is the timeframe as far as the AI coworker learning about languaging and characteristics and maybe values and all that of an agency? Is there a timeframe where. Because I actually have. I don't know if I've said this publicly, but it's getting this close. I'm going to just go ahead and say it here, if I may. I have a clone.

You do?

I do.

Yeah.

And it's operable and it works.

Or am I talking to the real.

No, this is the real Mike Stromso. I am unstoppable. Well, the club says that, too. Wait a minute. What can I give you? We were talking about this beforehand. I'm in San Diego, California right now.

I love it.

Yeah, the club can't say that, right? You're on aloha time. But anyway, back to the matter at hand. So it's, you know, and I've learned Through creating this. And the goal is just to help people 247 when they need it, right?

Yeah.

It's the back end data that you feed it, right?

Yes. I think the more data you bring into the coworker, the more it learns. But I think that's also where some of the technology has failed, which is it expects full data from agencies, it expects complete data. If you don't have complete data, it wouldn't work. That's not how your team works. They work with missing information, they work with times where you send something and then they figure out how to answer the rest of the things. And I think that's also when I say we're designing this like a coworker, it would feel like it because as you mentioned, what is the timeframe from adding an agency's preferences? I look at every workflow is a function of what are the websites I'm going into, what is the process, what line of business am I working with and then what are the agencies preferences? You'll realize in like a 50% agency, every agent producer operates differently. They have their own intake checklist. Everybody is like looking at things a little differently. They also think about answering carrier questions little differently. And we have understood that. And what that gives us then is hey, let's start somewhere. But then learn from your preferences. The more data you give us. So there will be times where you send us submission. You don't give us all the information. That's completely fine. We know the type of questions carriers are asking or the type of AMS questions that are ahead of us and we'll just follow up with you, which is like hey, these four questions I'm not sure about, can you get that data from the client? There will be times where we will also make some assumptions about answers and go ahead and say, hey, this is the assumption we made. Give us feedback, we'll learn from it. So learning and training your team is the same as training your AI coworker. You're training them over time. They just get like they ask you the least amount of questions. And the hope is this is the last time you're training someone for quoting Autoline for instance.

Wow. Again it excites me the the future possibilities are just unlimited. And how you know these technologies can really support the independent insurance agency system. I mean we were talking before we started. You can reduce quote time for an agency up to one hour. Correct. Talk more about that.

Yeah, we have seen numbers which are really exciting across the board. I have every workflow that I pick up, I'M at least saving 100 hours per month for the team.

Usually 100 hours per month.

100 hours per month for any line of business. Any coding process that I'm picking up, you're saving an hour per quote for sometimes for two hours for code. If you're like working with a commercial auto commercial code that we are working with. And I think there's impact across the board from not just the hours you save, but you're also increasing your top line. When you get more time, you can start quoting from a little more carriers. When you get more time, you clear your renewal backlog. You don't work up till the last week to do renewals. Your renewal starts at day 30. And those sort of things then increase customer experience, increase your impact with your customers. But I think the best one I have heard is this idea of the decision maker basically told us. I'm investing in this because I want to show my team that I value their time. And I think that was impactful because you can keep increasing your top line, bottom line and those things is directly the impact. But the impact also is that there's 400,000 labor shortage coming to insurance. Let's make the work for all our insurance professionals a lot more better that you don't have to do a lot of this work.

That's something we have talked about recently and that right there, ladies and gentlemen, let me just repeat that one. You show your team.

Your licensed insurance professionals, the career driven best players, the A players, that their time is valued. Let that brick sit for just a minute. So vitally important. I mean I've got ideas that keep jumping out of my brain on all of this. So that is great stuff. Let me ask you a different kind of question because I hear this in agencies that I'm trying to get to convert faster to the automation technology and the AI tools that are in front of us. But they get resistance.

From some of the more, shall we say, seasoned team members.

Right.

Or I'll just say it, the older team members. Look, I'm old, I'm 63, everybody. So I'm not, I'm not talking about any age group. But with that being said.

Yeah.

You know, what would you say to somebody who says, well the team members don't want to adapt to that? What do you, what do you have to say?

Yeah, I mean I think in some, for some reason they are also right. A lot of times I have learned from so many agency owners that they have just been burned by a lot of insurtech. There are a Lot of promises that were made and then a producer goes in and they just don't see the nuances being captured. And when you have been burned a couple times, I can see the resistance that comes within the agency. I think that's also where we made one conscious choice that let me work within your existing systems, let me work within your email, let me pick up tasks just like your teammates do, and let me also ensure that there's a really high bar for accuracy for the nuances that you're mentioning. So what we have done is you work with ChatGPT, you know, sometimes you ask it a question, the answer just doesn't make sense, it's just hallucinating something. That same technology also powers a little bit of what we are building. So there will be inaccuracies, there will be things where it misses out on. But then we're not giving it to your producer to train the AI. We're not telling them to, hey, train this AI, so then this will do your job. Instead, what we say is let my own operations team jump in when things are breaking. When the AI coworker is not confident about an answer first, my own team jumps in and figures out, is this something where the UI did not, was, wasn't captured? Is this a document that we were missing XYZ things? And only when we are missing information, that's when we are bringing it back to your producers. So that's where we have seen adoption to rise a lot more within product producers, where, hey, this is working with my existing systems, they're coming back with a high bar for accuracy. And really the next time I give it some instruction, it doesn't forget, it remembers it for the next code it's doing. And that's actually also hard for human coworkers. I have seen offshore teams being hired and there's a lot of times where there's just inconsistencies. When you're doing 20 quotes a day, inconsistencies are bound to happen. You're not going to remember the preferences. And this is a step change from that experience. We are not saying we're not focused on software, we're focused on co working and learning from your processes.

So it's really learning the languaging and learning the personality. It's like dating.

You're having a date with your AI coworker and it's getting to know you, getting to learn about you. And once it starts learning about you and your habits and your nuances and it starts picking it up and quote, learning the language, right yeah, yeah. And over time it just keeps getting better.

Yeah, we have this calibration phase after the two week of deployment. We have this phase where guys at least send us like 30, 40 quotes through us and see us do those quotes. And we have seen the first five quotes. We are making a questioning five times saying, hey, how should I fill this out? You didn't mention this in the early SOP or the instructions that we created by the 40th court. You are basically not seeing any questions coming from the coworker. And what we also then bring back with is a end to end recording of the coworker doing the work. So you have the ability to quickly review and scrub through. Is the coworker getting better?

That's fantastic. You know, it was also coming into my mind. I remember the days when we first got a VoIP voiceover Internet Protocol phone in our agency and it was. I don't even remember what they called the phones before that. But anyway, I remember because we were early adapters. I mean, I love technology. I was always in, you know, as soon as I could get in. But I remember it was quirky and clunky and you couldn't always understand things and there was hiccups and I was, I wasn't screaming, but I was a little excited with my technology company at the time. And they said, it's going to learn the language of your systems. It'll take a week or two, but it will get better, we promise you. And that was true after, you know, a month or so. It was rocking and rolling. It was perfect. And we had the freedom of technology at our fingertips with our phone systems. And so I think that all of this is kind of the same kind of thought process. You know, we got to get used to each other. We're going to go on a date, we're going to go on a second date and a third date and a fourth date. Then we're going to start to really like each other and we'll get to the point of love where now we can't live without our AI coworker. Right.

Well, I love this analogy. I might use this in the next conference and take it from there, I think. But you're also spot on, which is every single agency we have worked with today, they have also had a mindset of adopting new technology. They have had the mindset that things will might not work in the early days. But what I'm really doing is I'm investing for the future. I'm getting an edge in the market because at all points, you can invest in technology and you will get an edge, but this is type of work that is inevitable. It's inevitable that your producers need not go into 50 different carriers and do the same data entry work. So it's going to change. It's more a matter of time. When is your investment going to come in?

Well, if I can figure out how to get the AI coworker to get this from me to you right now so you can take it back to New York with you, that would be awesome.

That looks like an amazing diamond.

Well, it is. I teach people that this is your independent insurance agency business, this diamond, and your goal is to keep polishing this diamond to make it more brilliant and valuable all of the time. But this kind of thinking, and I love that you just said that the mindset of technology, the mindset of AI co workers and all of that, it makes your agency more valuable when you adapt and implement and adopt it into your agency business. Because the future, the people that whenever your day comes, whether it be 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15, 20 years, they're going to look and say, tell us about your tech stack and tell us about what you're doing to adapt and adopt to the automation technology and the AI tools that are out there. And if you're not.

You'Re going to be a subpar value 100%.

And that's where you also come in, Mike. Right. I think I remember how you work with agencies. You work on the mindset like how do we lay out that plan, how do we reach those? Like, how do we reach and walk backwards from the milestones and everything. What we do is just a means to reaching the growth that agencies need.

Michelle, we could go on for hours, I know, but I know you have other appointments and thank you, thank you for being on the podcast today. I'm excited about the future. Thank you for all you're doing for independent insurance agencies everywhere. And again, everybody, if you want to learn more, just go to the website. Like I said, this is going to be an ongoing journey. My passionate goal is this year is the year that we're going to make sure that we get all the technology out in front to agents and I'm going to do everything I can to get a lot of people that have a lot of knowledge about all of this in front of you so you can learn to make the right decisions and what's best for you. Vishal is one of those guys. Go to K AI that's K like king, A like Apple, y like yellow A.I. that's their website. You can check it out, schedule a demo in the top right and go from there. Vishal, safe travels, my friend. Thank you for being on the podcast today.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Hang tight for just a minute. All right everybody, thank you. Thank you for joining us. And this is your first time on the podcast. Welcome. My name is Mike Strom, so I'm widely recognized as the leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about what we do@upplife.com you like unstoppable p like profit p like producers upplife.com everything we do is all based on helping agents with our 35 plus years of experience as an independent insurance agency owner to help them grow their business, create wealth and have more freedom so they can live life on their own terms as well. And that's what we teach and that's why we're here to help you grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom. And if you got great value out of today's podcast, please go to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com and share it with somebody else you care about. If you have another agent friend that you want, hey, if this message was awesome, you want to share it, just go to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com, find the podcast with Vishal and share it with them. And it'll be out there coming very soon as well so we can help each other grow and adapt into the future of this amazing industry. Thanks so much everybody. We hope this was in value. By the way, you can also find the podcast out there on all the channels like Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, our YouTube channel. Just search Unstoppable Profit podcast. We're out there. You can find this valuable information to share. Oh by the way, if you do go to our page, please go up to the top and click subscribe so you don't miss one valuable episode. All right again Vishal, thank you sir.

Thank you.

All right everybody. Until then, go implement technology. Go get in the right mindset to grow your business like never before. I will see you on the next episode.

Do you love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started? Visit www.upplife. com, that's uplife.

Com to learn more about our coaching and mastermind programs and how you can join our community of growth oriented agency owners today.