AI-generated leads have overtaken partner referrals as the top source of new business at Vouch, according to Travis Hedge (pictured), co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based commercial insurance broker. Hedge said companies finding Vouch through Claude, ChatGPT and similar tools became its leading lead source over the past three months, a shift he said is reshaping how the firm organizes its roughly 6,000-client book.
He took over the business in May 2026, just a few months after Vouch made its biggest structural call. In August 2025, Vouch agreed to sell its MGA, Corix Insurance Services, and its carrier & remained an independent broker under a multi-year distribution agreement with Hiscox.
Hedge said he built an MGA and carrier about eight years ago because the market had little appetite for venture-backed companies.
“There were six class codes for technology, and one of them was still CD manufacturing. So we set out to build an MGA and carrier business on our own balance sheet because we didn’t have carrier partners in market to work with at the time,” he said.
Vouch can now quote instantly through APIs with dozens of carrier partners, Hedge said, which meant its own carrier was no longer needed to serve its market. He said the brokered model has lifted conversion, retention and net promoter scores, and that the Hiscox relationship has continued after the sale. “We have an ongoing partnership with Hiscox, and that continues to be a great relationship for us,” he said.
He also pointed to economics. “In a carrier model, you’re paying out two-thirds of your economics in claims,” Hedge said, adding that holding risk on the balance sheet had slowed the company down. “As a broker, you can inherently move faster.”
Hedge said clients are delegating more of their research, and increasingly their thinking, to AI agents. The shift comes as carriers and brokers launch quoting apps inside ChatGPT, largely in personal lines.
“Claude and ChatGPT aren’t yet insurance experts, so those tools need the right interfaces and the right data to interact with on our side to give clients good advice,” he said.
At Vouch’s annual company summit in May, where Hedge took over as CEO, eight cross-functional groups of brokers, producers and other staff built prototypes of how they wanted to work. Engineers put some into production over the following eight weeks. Vouch then replaced its two business units, one for small companies and one for large, with five cross-functional teams. The restructure follows Vouch’s recent leadership appointments as the AI-broker race heats up.
One pilot pairs a client management team’s dashboard prototype with an internal agent, still under a code name, that brokers can delegate work to. About eight brokers are testing it with product and engineering staff. “It’s really important that those frontline brokers and producers are the ones prototyping themselves,” Hedge said.
“What would have taken us six months a couple of years ago, we did in eight weeks developing some of our internal agents.”
Hedge said high-volume repetitive work will be automated, but that judgment remains central in E&S and other bespoke lines. He said Vouch’s best brokers now manage two to three times the book they historically could.
He described an internal agent that scans data sources for signals on fast-growing clients. If a client goes from $0 to $100 million in revenue in a year, raises $500 million and triples headcount, a broker might otherwise not learn of it until renewal prep 120 days out. The agent now flags the change and drafts outreach. “Critically, though, the broker has to review it, edit it, and apply their own human judgment before that message and strategy go out to the client,” Hedge said.
Education remains a gap. Hedge said Vouch surveyed hundreds of founders and found that two-thirds of repeat founders buy business insurance at company formation, compared with none of the first-time founders. “A first-time founder often thinks, ‘I just need the cheapest policy to check this box.’ But the reality is you want a policy you’re confident will actually pay the claim when it matters most,” he said.
On legacy carriers, Hedge said scale works against speed. “I can’t knock the major carriers for being slow. It’s a byproduct of their success and size,” he said. He framed the change in broader terms. “Steve Jobs called the computer the bicycle of the mind. This is like the e-bike, at the very least.”
