“If you can’t manage people, you can’t manage bots. You’ll manage them worse.”
I keep getting emails from agency owners telling me they will not be hiring a virtual employee because they are taking a class to build their own bots.
I read those emails and laugh out loud. Not because the idea is stupid. Because the person sending it has no clue what they just signed up for.
I run agentic bots. I have companies built on them. We are building NexAgency on an agentic framework. I am spending hundreds of thousands of my own money plus investor money to make this real.
So when I tell you bots are not replacing your people in the next six months, twelve months, or thirty-six months, I am not saying it because I am scared of AI. I am saying it because I am elbow-deep in it. I see what is actually happening.
Licensed People, Unlicensed People, and Bots. All Three. Forever.
Here is the actual future of an insurance agency.
In twenty years you will still have licensed people. You will still have unlicensed people. You will have bots. All three. The agency will look completely different than it does today. But all three are staying.
What changes is the math.
Right now most agency owners pay licensed people $50,000 to $80,000 a year to do unlicensed work. That model is dying. Not because of bots. Because nobody who spent years getting their license wants to babysit a piece of software for $70K.
The person managing your bots will make $25,000 to $35,000. They will often live in another country. They will often have a four-year degree. They will want the job and be good at it.
That is the shift. Not “humans out, bots in.” It is licensed people doing licensed work, unlicensed people doing unlicensed work, and bots doing the work bots can actually do.
You Are Not Getting Out of Managing People
Here is the part you do not want to hear.
A lot of you are chasing bots because you hate managing people. Maybe you do not say that out loud. You are acting like it.
Your team keeps leaving. The ones who stay make mistakes. You think it is them. It is not them. You have no onboarding. You have no training. You have no SOPs. You have no workflow documentation. Of course your people are bad at their jobs. They have no idea what their job actually is.
Now you want to skip all that pain by buying a bot.
Here is the part nobody selling you a bot is telling you.
Bots are more rigid than people. A new hire can figure out a workaround on a weird policy change. A bot cannot. A bot needs the exact process, the exact decision tree, the exact data fields, the exact handoff. Everything you did not bother to build for your humans, you now have to build for the bot. Except now if you miss a step, the bot stops cold and nothing goes out the door.
If you cannot manage people, you cannot manage bots. You will manage them worse.
The AI Paradox
Here is the part the AI companies do not want you thinking about.
AI is not very good at what it does right now. The only way to make it better is for you to use it.
Read that twice.
You are paying to be the training data for the next version of the product. The current version is mediocre. The hype around it is industrial grade.
Why is the hype so loud? Because Anthropic, OpenAI, and the rest need their valuations to keep climbing. They need valuations climbing to raise more money. They need to raise more money because the current product does not make enough on its own. So they have to keep selling you the version that does not exist yet.
That is the paradox. The product is not finished. The pitch tells you it is. You buy the pitch. The valuation goes up. The company raises more money. They build the better product you already paid for.
I am not saying do not use AI. I use it every single day. I am saying stop treating the hype as truth.
Horizontal Bots vs Vertical Bots
This is where the math actually matters.
Horizontal bots do work that looks the same across every industry. Sorting your email. Drafting a meeting summary. Pulling together a calendar invite. Cleaning up a spreadsheet. These work pretty well today because the task is the same whether you are a plumber, a lawyer, or an insurance agent.
Vertical bots do work inside one specific industry. Insurance is vertical. The bot has to know your AMS, your carrier portals, your state filings, your endorsement rules, your binding authority, your policy language, your renewal cadence, your COI requirements. None of that looks like what a healthcare bot does. None of that looks like an email bot.
Horizontal bots are mostly ready. Vertical bots in insurance are not. They will be. They are not.
Anyone selling you a finished vertical insurance bot today is either lying or has never worked a service line.
A Real Example: Certificates of Insurance
Let me show you what this actually looks like in practice.
In our agency, between 40% and 60% of certificates of insurance go out without a licensed person touching them. Sounds like a perfect bot job. It is not.
An unlicensed human still has to oversee every single one. Even when it is set up as a master cert in the AMS, someone still has to:
- Make sure the wording is correct
- Confirm the additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary, and non-contributory language
- Confirm the certificate holder is listed correctly
- Monitor that it gets sent
- Monitor that it gets accepted
- Make sure the underlying insured actually has the coverage the cert says they have
A bot can fill in fields. A bot cannot catch the contractor who just dropped their general liability last week and is still sending out certs. A bot cannot read the email from the GC saying “we need this language added” and know whether your agency is allowed to add it.
That is one task. Multiply it by every other task in your agency. That is why you are not replacing your people in 36 months.
What You Should Actually Do
Stop hoping. Start building.
If you want bots to work in your agency, you need the foundation first. The same foundation you should have built five years ago for your people.
- Document your workflows
- Write your SOPs
- Build a real onboarding process
- Train your people on the systems you actually use
- Clean your data
Then route the work properly. Licensed people do licensed tasks. Unlicensed people do unlicensed tasks. Bots do the work bots can actually do today, which is narrow and specific.
The agency owners who win the next ten years are not the ones who replaced their people with bots. They are the ones who built the structure that makes all three work together.
If you cannot lead a team of humans, a team of bots will not save you.
It will just embarrass you faster.