Jimcor Agencies is automating the slowest parts of wholesale insurance – submission intake, data entry, and carrier routing – but its leadership is wrestling with a harder question: what happens to the entry-level jobs where the industry's next underwriters and brokers are supposed to be trained. Kristen Skender (pictured), chief growth officer and senior vice president of brokerage at the Montvale, New Jersey-based managing general agent (MGA), said the firm is cross-training associates on task automation and is beginning to elevate their team’s task level, rather than eliminating roles outright.
Jimcor, an independent MGA and wholesale brokerage founded in 1986 with access to more than 200 admitted and non-admitted markets, has built its modernization push around a people-driven growth strategy, narrowing the time it takes a submission to move from a retail agent to a carrier.
“We looked at how we could narrow the amount of time it takes to go from a submission, an idea from an agent into our bucket, and then to the carrier,” Skender said. “That looked like a lot of OCR, scraping data from PDFs, streamlining redundant processes, and tackling those basic functions to start.”
From there, the firm expanded into higher-value tools, she said, from Copilot integrations to proprietary systems built for its own underwriters. Cyber has proven the easiest line to automate, Skender said, while other professional liability coverages remain resistant to instant integration because of their complexity and the varying pace at which carrier partners are willing to move.
The deeper challenge, Skender said, sits with the people, not the platform. Entry-level associates typically cut their teeth on early-stage work: checking submissions and verifying completeness before a file moves further into the pipeline. As automation absorbs that first step, the traditional on-ramp into underwriting and brokerage narrows.
“There's also a human capital dimension to consider,” Skender said. “If automation takes over that first step, what happens to that talent pipeline? Who becomes the next generation of underwriters and brokers if that foundational role disappears?”
Jimcor's answer has been to move people rather than remove them. “We've started cross-training associates who currently handle tasks like clearance and triaging applications,” Skender said. “As we roll out those automations and become confident in them, those associates are being prepared to take on different types of work, areas that require a higher level of expertise.”
The concern echoes a broader debate about the industry's growing underwriting talent shortage, as carriers, brokerages and MGAs confront a wave of retirements alongside automation that is increasingly absorbing the junior tasks new hires once used to build judgment.
Asked how far Jimcor would let agentic AI move into triaging submissions or scoring risk before a human needs to step back in, Skender said she put the question to her own team. “Curiously enough, they all gave the same answer: it's too soon to tell,” she said. “There's no limit on how far we would go. The technology itself is the current constraint.”
Complex placements, she added, including layered casualty and excess property risk, will require a human touch “longer, potentially” than smaller, transactional accounts.
Skender also pushed back on a common misconception among retail agents: that shopping a risk to multiple wholesalers unlocks meaningfully different markets. Jimcor's proprietary comparative rater lets agents drag and drop an ACORD application and receive up to 10 indications from a single submission, a capability now reflected across some of the country's top-performing wholesale brokers and MGAs. “If a client uses that tool, they drag and drop their application, they get 10 options, it's likely very similar to what they would get from any other wholesaler,” she said.
For Skender, the throughline across automation, talent and distribution is the same: technology should remove friction without removing the relationship. “We want to become a concierge service, a genuine value-add,” she said. “If we only become a technology company, we're only as good as the next technology that comes out, or whoever beats us in the race.”
