AI Is for Everyone
Robert Badoux · Founder, Insurance Agent · October 10, 2026 · 4 min read
Quick question. Who do you think AI is for?
Silicon Valley guys in vests? Your nephew who "does crypto"? The carrier with the nine-figure tech budget and the same hold song it's been playing since 1997?
Cool. Love that for them.
So let me tell you who built the first piece of AI in my agency. It wasn't a developer and it wasn't me. It was a seventeen-year-old part-time service rep who got tired of typing the same contractor application into the same quote website, over and over, day after day, and one afternoon decided there had to be an easier way and wrote a little script that typed it once and filled it in everywhere. The kid didn't have a budget or a consultant or a six-month implementation plan - just a free account and a bad afternoon.
Honestly, that's the whole company, and everything we've built since then is just us pulling on that one thread.
Now look at what happened last month. One of the biggest tech companies on the planet launched an AI assistant that shops auto and home insurance for people. Your client can ask their phone to find a better policy, and the phone goes and does it while they make dinner. So your clients have AI, the carriers have AI, and the software you log into every morning is putting AI into every screen it has. The one person in that whole chain still doing everything by hand is the agent sitting in the middle - and that's the person who can least afford to.
About five hundred years ago a goldsmith named Gutenberg built a printing press. Before that, if you wanted to know what the Bible said, you mostly had to ask somebody, because the books were copied by hand, chained to desks and written in a language most people didn't speak. A small group held the words and everybody else waited to be told. Then the press showed up, and within a couple of generations regular people were reading it at their own kitchen tables. The words stayed exactly the same - what changed is who got to hold them, and that changed everything.
That's where we are with AI right now. For the last couple of years it's felt like something behind a velvet rope - you need a developer, a budget, a consultant and a "digital transformation strategy," whatever that means. You don't need any of that, because the tools are sitting right there, most of them free or close to it, and they read and write plain English. If you can explain a task to a new hire, you can explain it to AI. Right?
So who is it for? Everybody in this business, and I mean everybody.
- The agency owner. You got into this to sell. Day one, you sold all day. Year three, you serviced all day. AI is how you get the selling back without hiring three more people to do the typing.
- The CSR. I know a lot of you are nervous about this and I get it, but the part of your job that's going away is the copy and paste. The part that's coming is running the desk - knowing the clients, making the calls that matter, and approving what goes out the door. It's a harder job and a better one, and I'd rather you be the one running it.
- The producer. Every hour you spend chasing a loss run or rebuilding a submission is an hour you're not in front of somebody. Let the machine build the packet while you go have the conversation with the person who actually signs.
- The client. Megan doesn't want an eighty-four page PDF named after a policy number. She wants to know if the ladder is covered, in plain words, before Saturday.
For me, guys, this is the most exciting thing that's happened in this industry since I walked into it in 2014. But I know that for a lot of people, things we don't quite understand cause some fear, so I'll say it plainly. If you want nothing to do with AI, I totally understand. But your clients already have it, and pretty soon they're going to expect the people they pay to have it too. Sitting it out doesn't keep it out of your agency - it just means somebody else decides how it gets used.
We doux not gatekeep around here. Everything we learned building this inside a real agency, the good days and the sh*tty ones, we wrote down and put out for free. There are six recipe cards - inbox triage, certificates, policy changes, payment follow-up, quoting intake and renewals - and each one is a single file you load into Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, with nothing to install. And if you've got somebody in-house who likes to build, there's a full builder kit that walks them through the whole thing step by step and checks their work as they go. You sign the kit license, which basically says you build it, you run it and you answer for it, and they're yours.
You don't need anybody's permission and you don't need anybody to read it to you. Pick one thing that eats an afternoon in your office and hand it over this week, and then call me and tell me how it went. We'll grab a coffee. The six-dollar kind.