Farmers Insurance has used artificial intelligence to cut the time its 8,000 agents and their staff spend on routine servicing by 35%, freeing up roughly 16.4 million hours a year that the company is redirecting toward sales and customer relationships, according to Phil Leininger (pictured), SVP and head of customer and agent solutions at Farmers Insurance. The effort, called Agency Servicing Efficiency 35, launched in June 2024 and hit its two year target this year, Leininger told Insurance Business America.
Farmers built the program by asking its more than 8,000 agents and the roughly 20,000 people they employ what tasks were not adding value to their day, Leininger said. “The first step, when deciding which parts of the journey to address, is always to ask the people who deal with our customers the most, our agents,” he said. “We do office visits, forums, listening sessions, and we talk directly to them to ask very specifically what are the things you do on a day to day basis that are not adding value.”
The company started with personal lines, where the bulk of policy volume sits, before finding that the same fixes carried over to commercial and specialty products. Farmers is now in what Leininger calls phase two, focused on specialty and business insurance lines, where documentation and underwriting demands run higher than routine auto, home, and umbrella business. That mirrors how fast AI is reshaping insurance operations industry wide, as carriers increasingly look beyond personal lines for AI driven productivity gains.
Leininger said his team calculated that agents and their staff were spending close to 50 million hours a year servicing existing customers before the initiative began. Cutting that by 35% meant removing 16.4 million hours from the system. “If you think about 16.4 million hours at the average cost of a CSR or office staff member, it's a tremendous amount of economic value that we gave back to the agents,” he said.
The program also cut inbound phone and chat volume from agents by 54% for new business interactions and by 23% for existing business, according to Leininger, who oversees Farmers' contact centers, digital team, and service centers. He said the company kept its service team the same size even as its book of business grew. “We were able to keep the same size team as we grew our portfolio, and at the same time level up our team so they were spending more time on higher complexity, higher emotion, higher value work,” he said.
One of the most significant changes, Leininger said, folded more than 300,000 documents, notifications, and articles into a single large language model based tool called askfarmers.ai, which replaced five separate systems agents previously used for breaking news, policies, procedures, rates, and forms. Agents can now ask questions and hold a conversation with the tool much as they would with a consumer AI assistant, he said, and it resolves more than 60% of the questions that used to become calls to the service center. That kind of consolidation reflects why insurers that build their own AI tools gain an edge, as carriers move past bolt on point solutions toward integrated systems.
“We are not trying to replace our people at all. What we're doing is augmenting and amplifying their skills.” — Phil Leininger, SVP, head of customer and agent solutions, Farmers Insurance
Leininger said Farmers applies a three part framework, make it work, make it fast, make it easy, to every agent and customer journey it touches, checking first that a system functions reliably before optimizing for speed and then simplicity. He said the approach is deliberately enterprise wide rather than confined to his own team. “This was not a service center initiative,” he said. “This was an enterprise initiative where underwriting, product, distribution, agency partners, the back office, and sales teams all came together to solve these challenges collectively.”
Leininger said he expects the industry to move away from measuring AI success by how much technology gets deployed and toward whether it actually reduces effort, a shift already visible in how other carriers are automating specialty insurance workflows, as insurers standardize AI across product lines rather than treating it as an isolated pilot. “Digital for the sake of digital, or AI for the sake of AI, doesn't work in a relationship based environment,” he said. “We are leveraging it to augment and amplify. That's probably the most important part of our strategy.”
