Jennie Carr (pictured), AU, CIC has spent more than two decades watching insurance technology change how a wholesale broker's day looks, and almost nothing about what the job is for. As artificial intelligence takes on more of the administrative load inside excess and surplus brokerages, Carr, vice president of commercial brokerage at Indianapolis-based wholesale broker Arlington/Roe, argues the more pressing problem isn't resistance to new tools – it's getting a fragmented industry to use them together.
Carr joined Arlington/Roe in 2004, coming up through IT and marketing before moving into E&S underwriting and brokering. “I was manually rating accounts. I was using a ProRata wheel, literally showing my work in pencil, searching walls of paper files for a missing file and sometimes having to run around the office to find it,” she said, describing an era before her now-dispersed team could simply pull a file remotely.
That manual process has given way to systems that surface information almost instantly, raising expectations on both the retail and carrier sides. Even so, she maintains the core of the job has stayed constant. “We still need to understand the risk and the markets. We need to find solutions, negotiate, and build relationships,” she said.
“What has changed is how quickly we're expected to do these things, and what tools we have available to do them with.”
The E&S segment – the part of the market handling risks admitted carriers won't take on – has grown quickly enough that Insurance Business America's report on wholesale brokers and MGAs gaining ground amid the surplus lines surge found a third of retail brokers now place more than half their business through wholesale partners, up from roughly a quarter a year earlier. Carr said that pace is why automation matters: there's more information than any broker can retain, and it changes too fast to stay memorized.
“Technology can surface the right information at the right time, streamline a lot of the transactional work, and give our people more time to do what humans are really good at the problem solving, the negotiating, the advising, and the building relationships,” she said.
Carr pushed back on the idea that broker or agent resistance is what's holding modernization back. “I'm not sure the biggest obstacle in our role is actually resistance – I think it's fragmentation,” she said. “Everyone is modernizing at a different pace, in different ways, and on different platforms.”
As a wholesaler between retail agents and carriers, Arlington/Roe deals daily with partners at very different technological maturity levels – some running sophisticated APIs, others still relying on email or, in Carr's case, a recent and unexpected return to sending a fax. That gap leaves brokers as a manual bridge between systems, a dynamic Insurance Business America has explored in its coverage of how artificial intelligence is reshaping wholesale insurance distribution, even as firms build AI tools specifically to close it. “The next phase of modernization isn't simply adding more tech; it's making tech across the insurance ecosystem work together,” Carr said. “We have to do that without losing the flexibility and human judgment complex risks require.”
The harder challenge is redesigning work around what technology frees up, not adopting more of it. “If technology can give a broker back an hour in their day that they can spend talking with an agent, learning a new coverage, negotiating with an underwriter, mentoring a younger associate, or finding a solution for a difficult account – that's the real return,” she said.
That question carries added weight against a tightening labor market: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected a shortfall of roughly 400,000 insurance jobs by 2035, per a 2025 ReSource Pro industry analysis, a gap Carr said makes training the next generation of brokers a leadership priority. “I don't want to just train people to be good at processes. I want them to understand how the business works,” she said. “Part of that is also knowing when AI gives you an answer, to ask: did we frame the question correctly?”
“If done correctly, technology doesn't make wholesale brokerage less human. It actually gives us the opportunity to spend more time on the business that requires us to be human.”
Carr said that shift will define value in wholesale broking over the next five years: less transactional data entry, more coverage knowledge, negotiation and judgment. “It's not going to be about the person who's fast at data entry,” she said. “It's going to be about relationships and human interaction.”
