Zywave CEO Martin Simoncic: Why Insurance Needs a Different Conversation around AI
Martin Simoncic sat down with Coverager to talk about why the industry’s AI narrative is broken, and what it actually takes to win.
Q: Talent shortages, stagnant growth, low producer productivity are not new problems to the insurance industry. Why is AI the answer now?
The front office is where revenue is won or lost. But for too long, the industry has poured investment into the back office, chasing efficiency. Here’s the issue: in this environment, efficiency is a limiting factor. You can’t cut your way to growth. The back office has never won a client, placed a policy, or grown a book. Producers have been the most under-resourced people in the industry ecosystem, and we need a mindset shift, one that empowers the front office to maximize productivity and revenue potential.
AI now enables companies to do more than just squeeze cost out of the business. It’s changing the way brokers, producers, and agencies work to grow. The organizations that win are using AI to give producers faster quoting capabilities, sharper account intelligence, and pipeline clarity to accelerate revenue growth, while also redesigning roles to deliver the value that only humans can: judgment, relationships, trust. That’s where the real competitive advantage is right now.
Q: Where are organizations in Agentic AI adoption?
It all depends on whether they’ve had their AI light-bulb moment: are they recognizing what AI can do with their teams to drive their business forward? The reality is today’s organizations are in various stages of their agentic AI adoption journey.
Based on our discussions with customers, the most advanced insurance businesses are building workflows inside Claude, Copilot, and ChatGPT, and other preferred AI tools. The technology environment has opened up, and the business value now flows through APIs, and embedded agents (both home-grown and third-party), wherever work already happens. The question is no longer whether AI is ready for insurance. The question is where can AI most benefit your teams to help them do what they do most effectively.
Q: The industry has a lot of noise around AI right now. How should insurance leaders actually be thinking about it?
I’d start with trust. In insurance, trust doesn’t come from claiming to be an AI company. It starts with domain expertise: verified, structured, insurance-specific intelligence that gives AI outputs something defensible to stand on. Generic AI is not the answer – hallucinations with one-size-fits-all AI is very real (and potentially very costly).
Second, capacity: the real divide will not be between companies that use AI and those that do not. It will be between the ones that use it to get producers out of fragmented administrative work and into advising, relationship-building, and growth versus the ones that just got a slightly faster tool.
Third, growth measurement. Growth isn’t a dashboard metric. Instead, it’s about a client who finally has the right coverage; a producer who handles fifty more accounts without dropping one; or a broker who answers in minutes instead of days. For years enterprise software has sold on efficiency claims. Efficiency is not enough anymore.
Q: What’s wrong with measuring AI value through efficiency?
Consider the environment: a softening market, a talent shortage that shows no signs of easing, and rising loss costs squeezing margins from every direction. Doing what the industry has always done, only marginally faster, will not produce a different outcome. If your growth strategy is “the same playbook, plus efficiency,” you’re not adapting, you’re just running in place a little quicker.
The customers I talk to know this. They aren’t primarily trying to cut costs; they’re trying to grow. That means winning new business and retaining and expanding the existing book, all without adding headcount they can’t find or afford to hire anyway. That’s not a nice-to-have anymore; it’s the only path forward when the market won’t let you grow by throwing more people at the problem.
So this is the measurement that matters: measure AI by its ability to drive organic growth, not by hours saved. Efficiency is table stakes. Growth is the driver that moves the business.
Q: What does winning look like for a distribution organization five years from now?
The winners will have redefined what their producers can do, not just to win new business, but to keep and grow it.
AI does not replace the producer; it raises the ceiling on what they can achieve, across the full lifecycle of a client relationship. A producer running agentic workflows can carry a larger, more complex book because the administrative work that used to consume their week is now handled. On the new business side, the research, the outreach, the content selection, and the follow-up that secure meetings are automated.
On the retention side, the book is scanned continuously, every upcoming renewal is scored by opportunity, and a prioritized action queue surfaces 90 days out with predictive quotes and protection-gap flags already built in, based on real market trend analysis. That means every renewal stops being a task and becomes a prepared conversation, one where the producer walks in already knowing where the opportunity is, rather than scrambling to find it. The producer’s time shifts to advising and deepening client relationships: the work that builds trust, protects the renewal, and drives retention and growth.
The companies that pull ahead will not be the ones that found the best AI tool. They will be the ones whose leadership understood, before the window closed, that this was a decision about how to win new business and grow the existing book simultaneously, not what to buy.
About Martin Simoncic
A software industry veteran, Martin Simoncic joined Zywave as CEO in September 2024 to help lead the company through its next phase of growth. Prior to joining Zywave, Martin served as the President of the B2B business of PROS Holdings, Inc., a provider of AI-powered SaaS solutions. During his time at PROS, he also held the roles of Chief Customer Officer and Vice President of Product Management. Previously, Martin was Vice President of Customer Success and Professional Services at Vertafore, a provider of insurance technology and distribution solutions. Martin has a passion for teaching and spent a decade teaching management and marketing as Adjunct Professor at the Rice University MBA program. A Houston resident, Martin enjoys spending time in nature with his family and watching his daughter play volleyball at tournaments around the country.
