Before your first call
Start here.
The arguments the weekly call keeps coming back to, recorded and written down once so nobody has to sit through them twice. Either half is enough to walk in prepared.
Watch this first
AI for Insurance Agencies: How to Actually Think About It
The baseline for the whole thing, recorded so the weekly call does not have to start from zero every week. The tool framing, mapping the workflow before picking any technology, why pointing AI at chaos only produces faster chaos, and the vocabulary the sessions build on. Watch it before your first call.
14 min · Watch on YouTube
Read in this order
- 1The three eras of agency operationsManual, then rules, then work that reads and decides on a schedule. Most owners think they are behind because they never automated. The ones who are actually stuck are the ones who automated well.
- 2Why your last automation project failedAn autopsy on era two. It was almost never the tool. It was rule sprawl, where every rule was reasonable when you wrote it and the accumulation is what broke.
- 3The workflow is the foundation. The tool is the superpower.Map how the work actually happens before you talk about technology. Trigger to outcome, who does each step, what causes the next one. The software tool is the absolute last question.
- 4It is not automation versus AI. It is deterministic versus judgment.The word automation carries if-this-then-that baggage, which makes AI sound like something that waits for a human to prompt it. It does not. Both run on a schedule. The line that matters is whether the step needs somebody to read something and decide.
These build on each other in this order. Everything further down reads fine on its own.
The channel
Everything else on the subject lives on Insurance Automation Lab, the channel that video came off — walkthroughs, teardowns, and the builds these sessions keep referring to.
Everything else written down.
No order to these. Each one answers a question that came up on a call and kept coming up.
Skills
Build a brand voice skill first
The easiest useful skill an agency can build, and the right first one if you have never built anything. People can tell when something came out of a model, and the moment it does not sound like you, it reads that way.
Deciding
The builder's tax
The real cost of building it yourself is not the build. It is owning it afterward, forever, usually as the only person who understands it. Count it honestly, then decide.
Deciding
Rules or judgment: how to pick which one a step needs
Not a product comparison. A decision. Rule based automation is the right answer for a large share of agency work, and knowing exactly where it stops is what makes the rest credible.
Deciding
What is actually worth pointing this at first
Not whether to adopt AI. Which of your problems to point it at first. High frequency plus high annoyance plus low judgment is where you start, and the reason is that you can tell within two weeks whether it worked.
Come to the next one.
Thursday, August 27 at 11:00 AM Central. An hour on Google Meet, free. Bring something you have got running, or something that isn't working yet. The second one is usually the better hour.