The predictions of broker irrelevance have been arriving for about two decades. They have not materialized.
Independent agencies wrote 62% of all US property and casualty insurance premiums in 2025, according to the Big I's 2026 Market Share Report - up from 61.5% in 2024. In commercial lines, the figure was 87.7%. The independent agency channel's share of personal lines has also grown, reaching 39.5% in 2025 compared to 36.7% in 2021. These are not the numbers of a channel in structural decline.
But the conditions that will sustain that position are changing. And the question the firms at the Insurance Business US Leaders Network transformation roundtable were asking is not whether the broker survives - it is what kind of broker survives.
Kate Grasman, chief information officer at Heffernan Group, makes the competitive case from lived experience. "The digital brokers that you're seeing will certainly disrupt some of the work that's happening. But from where I sit, it's harder to build the network of producers and that knowledge base. It's easier to actually find the tech."
A digital-native entrant can acquire technology capability relatively quickly. Building the network of experienced producers, the carrier relationships, the deep client understanding, and the complex-risk placement expertise that characterizes a mature independent agency takes years and cannot be compressed.
Grasman joined Heffernan specifically because of that expertise. "I couldn't find a carrier or company to place my insurance for my house. But I actually called Heffernan, and they were able to place the insurance, make sure that my house was fireproofed." The digital channel had no answer for her specific problem. The broker did.
Ryan Deeds, head of AI and enablement at ALKEME, sees a market segmentation emerging rather than a single channel winning. "When you're working with large organizations that have massively complex risks that are hard to variabilize, you want humans in there. They're buying trust. And you're going to see a segmentation between the way brokers handle smaller accounts and figuring out what touchpoints make sense for what, and that automation should then allow you to do more for those other clients."
That segmentation tracks with what the market data shows. Digital direct channels have made the largest inroads in simple personal lines - auto, renters, straightforward homeowners. Commercial lines and complex personal risks have remained overwhelmingly broker-placed. The implication for brokers is not that they are immune to disruption but that the disruption is concentrated in the segments where the value-add was always thinner.
The productive response is to use automation to become less dependent on volume in those thinner segments while developing deeper capability in the complex segments where human judgment remains indispensable.
Jennifer Kessel, chief operating officer at USG Insurance Services, resists the either/or framing entirely. "I would say it's digital plus broker. There's something that's common between what Kate said and Ryan said, and that's a human involved."
Her historical frame is useful. The insurance industry has navigated technology transitions before - paper applications, mailed policies, electronic submissions - and in each case the broker's role changed rather than disappeared. "Moving forward, based on the technology that's evolving, it will change what the expectation our client has of us - and so how we're interacting with them, the level of expertise that we have, the level of value that we bring, that all changes."
Kristen Skender, chief growth officer at Jimcor Agencies, is building toward what that combination looks like in practice. "We're taking a step back and we're asking our carriers and partners, as well as our clients and agents, what their strategy is and where we can add value in the distribution chain. And then looking to solve for that to eliminate friction, ultimately give them a great user experience that's wrapped around top-end technology with a human touch and concierge-level service."
Deeds flags the strategic risk that sits beneath the optimistic outlook. "There's risk of how do we continue to evolve to that trusted advisor that's its own revenue stream, to protect from encroachment on other entities."
That framing is worth sitting with. The broker's current position - handling 87.7% of commercial lines - is partly a function of established relationships, market inertia, and the genuine complexity of placing commercial risk. Those advantages are real. They are also not guaranteed to persist if brokers continue to provide primarily transactional service that technology can increasingly replicate.
The broker who has used automation to eliminate the transactional overhead and reinvest that time in deeper risk advisory work is building something that is genuinely harder to displace. The broker who has not made that shift is occupying a position that looks more secure than it is.
