The insurance industry has a long, storied history. In the U.S., the oldest insurance firm is the Philadelphia Contributorship, which was founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin himself.
While insurance companies are known for their lengthy histories, they have less of a reputation for innovation. A 2024 survey from Earnix found that 77% of insurance companies “still use outdated, legacy technology…” Even as fast-moving InsurTech startups disrupt the industry, insurance companies are still slow to embrace new technologies like AI.
Insurance companies employ a comparatively older workforce. According to a 2024 article from Insurance Journal, 50% of today’s insurance industry is expected to retire by 2028. For employees nearing the end of their career, the idea of adopting new technologies can seem unnecessary and overwhelming.
But with technology evolving faster than ever, you can’t afford to ignore the value offered by AI. While your organisation stands in place, your competitors could be racing ahead by empowering their employees with AI tools.
Here are four steps to embrace AI in your revenue organisation, helping even the most tech-adverse employees to become AI-ready:
1. Look first to AI answers
It’s one thing to give your employees a new tool. It’s another thing entirely to get them to use it.
The more your employees invest in AI tools like Highspot Copilot, the more value they’ll see. You should encourage an “AI-first” approach to sales workflows. When deciding how to answer a buyer’s question, your employees can query your entire library of resources and receive instant answers. The result? Faster, better messaging for every potential deal. By leaning on AI answers, your sales reps become more productive and more effective.
AI answers should be particularly useful for the insurance industry because sales reps are responsible for knowing the nuances of a wide, complicated range of products. Need to know the differences between two life insurance products? AI can provide the answer quickly, saving valuable time while delivering a precise result.
2. Teach employees to teach themselves with AI coaching
Every employee needs a mentor to grow and succeed, but managers rarely have the time to provide 1:1 coaching to every member of their sales team. AI coaching and skills development make it easier for your sales reps to coach themselves, asking questions about their performance and receiving actionable feedback.
When AI is tuned into your entire sales organisation, it can quickly determine which assets and messages are most effective in each conversation. That information informs AI coaching, which helps each of your sales reps to deliver the best message in every interaction. Over time, every member of your sales team becomes your most effective salesperson.
3. Encourage an AI mindset shift
For your sales reps, one of the most time-consuming tasks is simply sending emails and responding to questions. Crafting an effective message isn’t easy, particularly for newer members of the team. Sales reps can struggle with time management when trying to stay on top of dozens of customer relationships.
AI makes it possible to get a running start on all of those emails and follow-ups. Your sales reps need to embrace a shift in mindset: from “writer” to “editor.” Instead of starting each email from scratch, you can give AI the context it needs to generate a first draft. From there, you simply need to review the output and make small adjustments before sending it to the customer. This new mindset doesn’t just make your employees more productive — it also helps them to start thinking like a manager, putting them on a path to career development.
4. Personalise every sales conversation
Building trust is crucial for sales reps in the insurance industry: customers need to believe the insurer will honour its commitments. The best way to build that trust is through personalised outreach. If your sales reps can demonstrate that they understand the customer’s needs on a detailed level, they’ll have an easier time moving the customer toward a deal.
In an industry that depends on sales volume, it’s impossible to know the nuances of every single customer and conversation. AI allows your sales reps to start from content templates and then tailor each asset based on customer information and other data. This is where the “writer to editor” mindset shift will continue to pay dividends: by allowing AI to do the bulk of the writing work, your sales reps can scale up their output to deliver personalised experiences to every customer.
Whether your sales reps are nearing retirement or just beginning their career, they will need to make AI part of their workflow to keep up with the competition. To learn more about how AI can help your sales team improve their skills and close more deals, download our new eBook on AI revenue solutions for the insurance industry.
