Curtis Barton calls 2026 a year of disruption for insurance brokerages, but some of the industry’s more consequential problems have been building for years. During the acquisition boom, he argues, investors rewarded firms for buying agencies quickly, often with little emphasis on integrating their operations. Now, as organic growth weakens and financing conditions tighten, those same businesses are being pressed to demonstrate how effectively they operate.
Barton, CEO of ALKEME, sees an industry confronting the limitations of acquisition-led growth. For firms that spent years assembling portfolios of agencies, the pressure has shifted toward integrating those businesses and improving their underlying performance.
Yet the operational difficulties tell only part of the story. Each transaction also changes the circumstances of the people whose relationships and expertise helped make those businesses valuable.
Consider an agency owner who sells to a regional brokerage, only to find that business acquired by a publicly traded company a few years later. The economics of the original deal may have been attractive, but the culture, expectations and people making decisions have changed considerably.
Years of client history, carrier relationships and practical judgment may reside with individuals rather than within the business itself. When they leave, their successors inherit the accounts without necessarily understanding the decisions behind them.
“Without the knowledge of the people, you can’t even begin to start to create the systems or the processes,” Barton says. “So knowledge is everything.”
Barton draws on his own experience working across different functions of an insurance agency. Having sold insurance and handled the operational work behind it, he is skeptical of processes developed without sufficient input from people who understand how brokerage work is performed.
He is particularly critical of what he calls “financial engineers,” executives whose plans may make economic sense but fail when applied to the practical demands of servicing clients.
“You have to have people that practically have sold insurance so they understand the process,” he says, warning that an apparently sound approach can become a serious operational mistake.
His shorthand is “garbage in, garbage out.” The useful starting point, in his view, is the result the firm wants. “What’s the desired output that we’re looking for? And let’s build back into what the input has to look like.”
Barton says a firm cannot add AI functionality, whether supportive or agentic, unless its procedures already run consistently. “You can create the coolest tool in the world, but you can’t get it to go. It’s got nowhere to go.” He argues that many firms are under investor pressure to present an AI strategy before the groundwork exists, and that they struggle to get staff to use what they build.
ALKEME, which generates more than $400 million in annual revenue, was established in 2020 around a centralized data model and common operating standards.
Its acquired agencies adopt those procedures, although Barton encourages employees to identify better practices developed in their previous businesses.
“If you have something that you’ve done in your organization that you think sets you apart, that we’re not seeing, bring it to our attention,” he says.
The company also maintains regional leadership, supported by centralized sales, carrier strategy and marketing functions. Barton considers local familiarity important because operating in New York, for example, differs substantially from operating in Orange County, California.
The intention is to establish consistency without assuming that every market or client relationship can be managed identically.
Barton argues that sophisticated applications are of limited use when the underlying data is fragmented or operating procedures are inconsistent. ALKEME’s centralized systems, he says, have allowed it to introduce internally developed tools with approximately 75% adoption among employees.
“If you don’t have strong SOPs that are running on rails, you can’t do it,” he says. Yet even reliable technology cannot compensate entirely for an employee’s lack of experience.
Barton now uses AI to perform certain financial modeling tasks that previously required assistance from financial planning specialists. The work can sometimes be completed in minutes, but he credits his understanding of the business for the quality of the results.
“It’s because I understand the business and I understand what I’m looking for so I can prompt it the right way.”
That presents a challenge when extending similar capabilities across a brokerage. Giving someone access to an answer does not necessarily give them the knowledge to recognize when the answer is incomplete or inappropriate.
Barton is also concerned about employees independently developing AI agents without adequate controls. ALKEME uses a ticketing system through which staff can propose applications for testing in a sandbox environment.
As ALKEME grows, he is increasingly concerned about which aspects of the business should become standardized and which should remain dependent on local leadership and individual discretion.
“One of the things that I wake up every morning thinking about is like, what do we absolutely 100% have to institutionalize in the business?” he says.
The accompanying concern is whether too much structure could make ALKEME resemble the corporate organizations that some independent agency owners deliberately avoided. At ALKEME each region has its own executive team and agency leadership, while a national director of sales, a carrier strategy team and a marketing team sit at the corporate level. He uses a physical metaphor to describe the split: “we’ll give you the skeleton, you put the muscle and the flesh on it.” Headquarters defines the structure, and each region adapts it. He says the adaptation is necessary because markets differ.
Barton is therefore cautious about institutionalizing the entire business. The more useful objective is to ensure that the departure of an experienced employee does not force everyone else to start learning the same lessons from scratch. The stakes, as he sees them, are about retention. Acquisitions bring change, and he says change is where people leave.
Looking ahead, Barton named three things he expects to define 2027: rigor, discipline and maturation. In his account, that means firms working through integration and organic growth with the same care they give to deal volume.
This article was produced in partnership with ALKEME Insurance
