Jennifer Kessel draws a distinction that most technology vendors would prefer to avoid.
"I hear a lot of we're saving X amount of time," said Kessel, chief operating officer at USG Insurance Services, at a recent Insurance Business US Leaders Network transformation roundtable. "For us, that's not in our ROI. There's something attached to it, but that's an efficiency. What I'm really interested in is what are we doing with that gained time? What other value are we providing? And that's where I start calculating the ROI."
That reframing - from time saved to value created with that time - is the analytical shift most technology investments never make it to. It requires knowing not just what a process costs now, but what the organization does with the capacity automation returns, and whether that use of capacity shows up in revenue or client outcomes.
The methodological foundation she describes is deceptively simple. "You have to look through the rearview mirror before you look through the windshield. We've become really disciplined about establishing a baseline before we do any type of implementation. How long does the process take? How frequently do errors occur? Where are the bottlenecks? Because if I don't know that, it's nearly impossible to prove what the investment actually improved."
Kate Grasman, chief information officer at Heffernan Group, has been working toward exactly that kind of measurable outcome for three years. Where many organizations stay at the efficiency layer, Heffernan has developed the infrastructure to track something harder.
"I was looking for hard savings because I wanted more money to invest in technology," she said. "What we did was work with our CFO to make an AI budget based on different business processes, and we actually looked at the offset of what are our BPO costs. Because of the technology that we implemented for proposals, certificate of insurance, policy check - we were able to actually manage those offsets to say, 'Hey, we're saving $600,000 this year.' And that's how we're actually determining straightforward bottom-line ROI."
That $600,000 in hard savings is a concrete data point that most organizations chasing efficiency metrics have not managed to produce. It came from three years of patient investment in establishing baselines, implementing deliberately, and tracking specific cost offsets against BPO spend - not from a single deployment.
The Big I's 2025 Best Practices Study, which surveyed leading independent agencies across all revenue tiers, documented comparable results at the firm level. One agency implementing an AI platform for producers and account teams reported staff saving an average of 7.5 hours per week. Another, piloting an AI-powered policy checking tool, achieved a 3,807% ROI by saving an average of 30 minutes per support staff member per day. The pattern the study identified consistently was that ROI was highest when automation was embedded inside existing workflows rather than sitting outside them.
Ryan Deeds, head of AI and enablement at ALKEME, approaches the measurement challenge from an analytics-first orientation that reinforces Kessel's baseline discipline.
"You have to know where you came from. How do we determine current state? What do you think future state should be? What's the gap between that? And then defining those success criteria." His team builds task taxonomies - a structured map of workflows by volume and time spent - to identify the highest-leverage targets for automation. "What's the largest volume thing that we could target to automate effectively so we can say we made a difference?"
He was candid about where ALKEME currently sits on the maturity curve. "I love what Jennifer said about save time is not enough. Right now, that's where we are. I would love to get to the mature point where we could say, 'Not only do we save you time, but we allowed you to advise your clients more effectively, and now we're 32% safer for organizations that adopt this kind of process.'"
That aspiration - from efficiency to demonstrable client outcome improvement - is the standard Kessel is already applying and that Deeds is working toward. The gap between the two is where most insurance technology investment currently sits.
Kristen Skender, chief growth officer at Jimcor Agencies, brings a smaller-firm perspective that grounds the ROI conversation in its simplest terms. "Being the size and stage of organization that we are, the first thing that we look at is, is it going to increase in terms of are we going to make money? Are we going to write more policies? An efficiency is great, but at the end of the day, what are we going to do with that time? How is it going to impact bottom-line sales?"
That directness is a useful corrective to measurement frameworks that can become elaborate without producing numbers that influence decisions. For a growth-stage agency, the ROI question is whether time freed from processing becomes time spent selling and serving - and whether that additional time produces revenue that would not otherwise have been written.
The measurement discipline those four firms describe is not complicated in concept. Establish a baseline. Identify what the gained capacity is being used for. Track whether that use produces revenue, retention, or client outcomes that can be quantified. Build the ROI case from the numbers, not from the efficiency claim. What is difficult is the patience it requires before the numbers exist - and the organizational willingness to hold the standard even when a vendor is promising immediate results.
