The push to automate is being aimed at the wrong targets, and brokerages that turn it on their customer-facing work are eroding the very thing that justifies their existence, says Curtis Samoy, founder and chief executive of Clementine.
Samoy said the most common mistake he sees is brokerages directing automation at the parts of the business that are core to their value rather than the routine work behind it. Customer-facing technology, and especially AI, is where that goes wrong. "Sending emails, writing blog posts or running your website's chat tools are part of what differentiates brokers from directs," he said. Those interactions are where a broker's judgment shows up, and handing them to a machine collapses the distinction between a broker and a direct insurer.
His argument rests on what a client is actually buying. People come to a broker for wisdom, experience and advice specific to their situation, Samoy said – not for a transaction a bot could complete. And if a bot can complete it, he argues, the client has no reason to be there at all. "If a bot can answer their questions and write their business in every sense except a legal requirement to speak to a human, then I'd argue they should be buying direct anyway," he said.
It is a pointed position for someone whose business is automation, and Samoy was careful about where he draws the line – or rather, where he does not. Pressed on exactly which interactions are safe to automate and which are not, he declined to prescribe it, saying that call belongs to the broker.
"We at Clementine try to automate the things that brokers are currently spending time on," he said – the mundane, non-value-add back-end processes they have already worked out, rather than telling them what should and shouldn't be automated.
That line, he said, sits in a different place for every brokerage, and that variation is itself a feature of the channel. Brokers talk about wanting uniformity and shared data, Samoy said, but in practice, they want to differentiate themselves and run their businesses their own way. "I think they each have a good sense of where their line is for their own brokerage, and we want to work with that," he said.
The flip side of automating the routine work, in his telling, is what it frees people to do – and it points to who brokerages should be building around. Soft skills are becoming the real differentiator while hard skills matter less, Samoy said, and automation should let brokerages lean into that rather than staff up against it. The relief, he said, is that a brokerage can grow without hiring rows of administrative processing roles. "You get to hire the people that make a difference to your customers," he said.
That framing runs against a common assumption that automation mainly threatens jobs. Samoy said few people in the broker channel do purely routine work; those tasks usually sit alongside higher-value responsibilities. Reception and front-desk staff, he noted, handle administrative work between answering calls, greeting walk-ins and acting as the first point of contact – and automating the administrative piece frees energy for the rest. Brokerages, he said, will keep hiring for the roles they always have: customer-facing producers and advisers who grow the book and make the brokerage a trusted, knowledgeable partner.
Underlying all of it is a view of where a technology vendor's value actually sits, and it is not in any single feature. For Clementine, Samoy said, it is the relationship and the trust ahead of the functionality. He does not envision a future where all the data flows freely and every brokerage operates identically – that, he said, would devalue the broker channel itself, and he does not believe brokers will let it happen. New and unique challenges will keep arriving, and brokers will bring them to someone they trust.
It is also, he said, an honest admission of how little anyone can forecast in a period this volatile.
"Even if the stuff we're doing now isn't valuable in five years, 10 years, we'll find other ways to add value," Samoy said. "As long as we're someone that brokerages will carry on a relationship with and continue doing business with, that's all we can hope for."
