Inside the Industry Special Edition: AgencyBloc + AI: A Conversation on the Future of Agency Work
Inside the Industry is a monthly video podcast hosted by AgencyBloc to take an insider's look at the health, group benefits, and senior insurance industry. Learn more about what's happening right now, what it means for your agency, and how your team can stay ahead of these changes.
Transcript for the Episode
Note: AB denotes Allison Babberl, CS denotes Cory Schmidt, and SS denotes Scott Sanchez
Allison Babberl: Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of Inside the Industry. As always, I'm Allison Babberl, Content Marketing Manager here at AgencyBloc. And you might notice I'm joined by some other people today. I do have a special guest, Cory Schmidt, Co-Founder of AgencyBloc. Good to see you, Cory.
Cory Schmidt: Good to see you, Allison.
AB: Especially at 8 AM on a Monday, the Monday after Daylight Savings Time, and the Monday after our guest, Scott, has been off for a week and just had to travel from the, what was it, West Coast to the East Coast, right? So I think it's a good Monday overall to do a podcast recording, don't you think?
CS: It's never a bad time.
AB: I feel most prepared. All right. Well, I know we have a lot of really great content to get to, so I'm actually going to pass it over to you, Cory, and step out and let you be the guest host for today.
CS: All right, well thanks for passing the baton and entrusting me with the podcast moderating responsibilities, Allison. I appreciate it. So yeah, I am very excited to be joined by Scott Sanchez, our Chief Product Officer at AgencyBloc. And sorry to catch you first thing on a Monday following a week of being out, Scott. How's the time zone change treating you right now?
Scott Sanchez: It's unclear what time it is, but, Cory, always, always good to sit and talk with you for a few minutes So I'm just gonna ignore the fact that it's a podcast.
CS: Let's do it. Yes, we're going to have a conversation. We'll call it that. So yes. No, just excited to connect with this group on a special edition of Inside the Industry. Obviously, typically, we're looking outside of AgencyBloc when we have these podcasts. But today, we're going to look a little bit more internally and really trying to cut through the noise of some of the AI headlines that we're hearing and really try to understand, you know, how AI is playing out at AgencyBloc in terms of how we're thinking about it within our products and those sorts of things. And obviously, you and I both know it has dramatically changed the way we're building software at AgencyBloc. No doubt that the way our teams are working and the tools they're using is very, very different than it was 12 months ago, even different than it was 3 months ago, right? So it's changing so fast, we can hardly keep up. But really what I wanna talk to you about is the discussion of AI capabilities within our products.
And so, we hear the headlines, there's lots happening. You've spent a lot of time, I think recently with agents on this concept of AI. I think they see it as inevitable. I've heard that word a few times, yet they remain deeply cautious. And so I guess just to kick things off, as a product manager, technologist, Scott, how are you thinking about this? How do you possibly wrap your brain around the level of change that's happening?
SS: Yeah, Cory, it's fascinating. Having been in Silicon Valley for about 10 or 12 years and now back in Atlanta, which is where I'm from, every 5-10 years, there seems to be some new big thing, right? And we're at AI. And to be clear, AI is powerful. Like it is an incredibly powerful solution. I often tell folks there's never been a better time to be a product or a technologist, right? With how we're building things, what we're building into these products, etc.
I guess the way I think about it, quite simply, is it is an incredibly powerful solution, but we also have to be really clear what problem we're solving. And so it is absolutely a better mousetrap, right? But if you're not clear what problem you're solving, if you're not clear what problem you're solving for our clients, this isn't a silver bullet. You can't just put AI on everything.
And then everything's better. Like you really have to be clear on the problem you're solving, the need you're solving. And if used well, I think it can absolutely change not just how we're building software, but how our agents manage their agencies as well. But I think we're in that mode of unfulfilled promise right now, like we've seen before. And so the trick is going to be how do we make sure it adds value and adds value in the right way for our agents? Because that isn't a simple thing to just do.
CS: Yeah, totally agree. I mean, I think back even to boy, I'm kind of dating myself, but you know, the original genesis of AgencyBloc was to be a web-based platform. And at the time, there were a lot of non-web-based platforms. And so when you thought about like, why it wasn't so we could say, we're web-based. It was so that agents could access the platform from anywhere. They could access it from their mobile device. They didn't have to worry about managing the backend platform that services the software. So it's sort of like a similar iteration where it's not like, no, I just want to use a web browser to access my software. It's no, I want to be accessible from everywhere. I want it to be easy to manage. I don't want to have to worry about the maintenance of the product itself. And so it's a similar kind of like evolution that I think we're going through. But this one's moving a little bit faster and is a little bit harder to navigate, I think, than that one. So I know you've spent a fair amount of time talking to agents. What are you hearing about what they're excited about? And maybe what they're pushing back on?
SS: Yeah, you know, it's fascinating. One of the things we do, and it goes back to the early days of AgencyBloc as well, is we're doing a lot more spending time with our clients, asking them questions, understanding what matters, what doesn't matter, etc, not just in AgencyBloc, but what do they do before AgencyBloc? What do they do after using our products? What do they do outside of our products? Because if we can solve their problems and address their needs even better, that's really what we're headed towards, and we can talk more about that.
What's been fascinating is we've been having some of these conversations with agents. You used the word inevitable earlier. It's inevitable. People know this is coming. They use it in their personal lives. They're using it to plan itineraries for trips. They're using it to compose emails. And so I would say, you know, in a headline there and they feel it's inevitable, but they're guarded about it. You know, they know it's coming. They know it's coming. They can almost feel it, here, if you will, cause they're seeing it in other places, but they're concerned, right? Because actually, you know, what they care most about is two things, their clients and their time. And so in many ways, as they think about using AI, they don't want AI to replace the relationship with clients. They do want it to help them save time. But how we do that is going to be really important to sort of work through because they need to trust — they want to stay in control. They want to own that relationship, but they do need help.
They're spending all of their time, especially during AEP and OEP, on the phone, on meetings, trying to help clients choose the right plan. How do we help to reduce that administrative burden, I think is sort of the key, but in a way that they start and build trust in it, just like they've built trust in us along the years.
CS: Yeah, makes complete sense. And I do think as a solution to help them be better at their jobs and maybe I always think about eliminating some of the mundane, non-value added things that people have to do. Like you mentioned, just composing emails. I don't necessarily want to do that. I have the key points. Help me write this email. I can understand how that translates to both excitement as well as a little bit of skepticism and concern about what that actually looks like in practice.
SS: Well, I think that's right. And I think that helped writing the email — great. But I still approve the email and I still review the email. We had one of our clients that we talked to. I think her name was, Christie, if I remember correctly. She basically said, I try to take the AI stuff and then un-AI it. So it doesn't sound AI. So it sounds human, right? Because I think that, in many ways, our agencies believe that that human is the key part of the relationship with their clients.
And that's great. And so I think as we build products and features, how do we enable that human, that agent to stay in control, to have it be their voice, to make sure they own the relationship, but make their job a little bit easier along the way.
CS: Yeah, makes sense. That is the one thing I think I've heard the most from customers is around just how important a deep personal connection is given that the very personal topic of health insurance, specifically. It's, you know, they really want to have that connection with their customers. And so it'll be interesting to see, and we'll get to it a little bit later in the script about how they see their role changing and evolving, because there is a spectrum at which you've got AI helping versus, you know, later on, maybe it's AI is doing more of the work. Maybe at some point, AI is doing a lot or most of the work, right? And so how that evolves, I think will be interesting. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But maybe before we go there, one thing I've noticed as an entrepreneur and someone who started a company, there's a lot of headlines out there, press releases about, we launched this new whizbang AI feature and here's what it does. And sometimes I'll look at those and I'll be like, well, is that actually something that the customers were interested in? Because it's not clear to me how that would bring value to a particular — and it's even outside of our industry. I'm referring to those kinds of things. And so obviously there's kind of two forces. One is that AI is critical and must be part of a strong value story for every business in every product. And then the flip side is customers have real challenges and opportunities that maybe aren't directly correlated to like a fancy AI use case, right? But it's still an important thing. And so I'm just curious, and you mentioned like having a problem-centric approach, and I'm curious like how we are navigating those two forces.
SS: Yeah, it's a really, it's a challenge because to your point, it feels like every day there's another article. There's another, oh my gosh, clients are gonna be able to build their own software product. Oh my gosh, this changes everything. Oh my gosh, like all of these things. And I think the thing that I've learned throughout my career is that's great and pay attention to that and learn and try to understand. But at the end of the day, it's gotta come back to what are the needs and problems that clients or customers have.
And so we're taking a very client-centered approach to this. We call it design thinking. It's really understanding our clients deeply, spending time with them, trying to get to know them even better than they know themselves along the way, and then translating that to features. Now again, AI is a very powerful set of tools, but you can build the best mouse trap in the world, but if your goal is not to catch a mouse, what good is it? And so I think a lot about what is our goal? What are we really trying to do? And, you know, the way we're thinking about it is this, to your point, problem-first, not AI-first, because if we can really understand and address the problems that our clients have, maybe using AI or maybe not using AI, that's what we're really focused on. Because what I've learned throughout my product career is if you stay focused on that, then all of the hype goes away because then you're just focused on falling in love or really solving for your clients.
Instead of falling in love with technology or solutions or the next key fad that's out there. To be clear, AI is not a fad. It is absolutely here to stay, and it's a hugely powerful tool. We just have to apply it the right way. And that gets into our sort of not AI-first strategy, but that problem-first strategy that we're trying to do here at AgencyBloc.
CS: Yeah, I love that. And one of the things I always remember is, you know, before you joined AgencyBloc, I know you shared a story around a company that really wanted to introduce AI in their product. And in a very specific way. And I think, if I remember right, as you peeled back the layers of that, that actually wasn't even the right problem to be solved. It had nothing to do with AI. It's just were we actually focused on the right problem? And so what I love about the work that you're doing, Scott, with our customers and the work you're doing here is really getting down to what are we actually trying to accomplish and how do we better enable agencies to do their jobs better? And give them the tools that they need. Now, obviously, many of those tools can be augmented with, built with, supported by AI, but let's just not do it just for AI's case, right? I don't think that's, yeah, I don't think that's a wise decision.
SS: Yeah, well, and don't think our clients want that. At the end of the day, what our clients want is they want us to solve their problems. They want us to solve the places where they're spending too much time, where they can't spend time on the phone or in person with their clients. If we can reduce that administrative burden. Look, I could automate, I could create an agent that would, you know, basically take the place of the agent. I could create an AI agent that could take the place of an agent itself.
Right? Sure, we could do that, but that's not what our clients need. That's not what our clients want. They want to maintain that relationship. And so I think trying to figure out and understand the guardrails between where we want to apply AI and where we don't is a really important part of this journey that we're on.
CS: Yeah, it's also interesting to think about what our customers want and don't want and then also what their constituents, their stakeholders, their customers want and don't want. Again, I feel like I continuously hear about how health insurance benefits is such a personal thing. And so to be interesting to see how that evolves in terms of, I think back to my early days at Blue Cross Blue Shield, I was the only person who had bought auto insurance online in a room of like 20 people when I started there. And that's obviously come a long way and changed a lot but again I think the the purchasing decisions, the consultation, the process in health is obviously a bit different so it'll be — I'm just very curious to see how that evolves and how that changes. But one thing I know you've mentioned is around making sure that we continue to think about keeping the expert in the loop or the guardrails that need to exist. How do you think about that, Scott, in terms of maybe what we're initially thinking about or what we're rolling out right now as it relates to AI?
SS: Yeah, there's this concept in AI called the human in the loop. Separate from AgencyBloc for just a second, the human in the loop concept is based on the fact that if you have an AI working, you always have a human in the loop to make sure it's working right so you can adjust. And so as I think about human in the loop, I apply it in two ways to us, to AgencyBloc. The first is in many ways, we want to put that agent in the loop of us developing our products, right? We will talk to them, as I was mentioning. We'll prototype ideas with them. We'll get feedback with them. We'll test things before. We'll test things as we roll it out. We'll test things after. And so in many ways we want to put the human in the loop. When I think about the guard rails around AI and what we're trying to do, I almost think of it as the, you know, the agent in the loop. And how do we create features that are really sort of enabling that agent to be in the loop and not beyond that. And I think that's the key. Our clients want to maintain these personal relationships. They are the licensed professional. AI is not, right? If you just simplify it down to that. And so I think it's, you know, the guardrails become around how do we make sure the agent knows what's going on? How do we make sure the agent knows what's visible? How do we make sure that agent reviews or approves anything that goes out to a client, especially in communication? Sure. We want to make the agent's job easier.
But at the end of the day, their name is on the door, if you will, and their client has that relationship with them. And so we have to be really careful with how we enable and strengthen those relationships as opposed to take away from those things. And then the other piece I think a lot about when I think about this expert in the loop is security, compliance, liability.
These are the things that have kept our agents in business that they rely on all the time. They spend their energy making sure they know the best, the latest and greatest. They anticipate, they know what's going on with changes in Medicare or ACA or whatnot. And so how do we make sure, how do we take care of the trust, the data, the security, the compliance, all of those things? Because even in a world of AI, those things still matter a lot.
And so as we're intentional about bringing AI out to our clients, we've got to make sure we enable those sort of core non-negotiables, if you will, so that we allow them to do what they need to do under the rules that are out there.
CS: Yeah, makes a ton of sense. I think, you know, even in my own use cases of AI, there's certain things I would, you know, trust it to be deterministic about. Like I know it's going to be good enough or close enough, whereas it seems like the, as you mentioned, security compliance, the things that are really important in our industry. I love this concept of like advisor in the loop, human in the loop. I just think it makes a ton of sense. Now that means there's still a lot of things to the left of that that we can help automate and make better. And one of the things I really liked is you had a spectrum of kind of the spectrum of the use of AI from, if I remember right on the left, it was like Basic Automation, Intelligent Assistant, Guided Autonomy, and then finally it was like Fully Autonomous. And so I'm kind of curious, like as you are, I know you're testing concepts, you're talking to customers, like is this a linear thing where you start at the left and then you progress to the right? Or is it more like a scatter plot, if you will? Like there's some things in some areas and other things in other categories?
SS: Yeah, you know, the short answer, Cory, is we're going to find out and we're going to test our way into it. But I would say, you know, this spectrum is interesting. One of the challenges with AI, we're still in that mode where it's unfulfilled in terms of promises. So one of the things that our team was really interested in doing is where has AI actually added value, right? Where does it solve problems? And autonomous vehicles are one of those areas. And so we sort of thought about that as sort of an inspiration for us. Where you go, if you think about your own driving, right? You go from sort of you're driving, maybe there's the old-style of cruise control that keeps the speed the same. Maybe then you get to adaptive cruise control and now it's sort of controlling spacing and lanes. And then you get to sort semi-autonomous driving and then autonomous vehicles. We thought that was a really interesting spectrum to think through. I don't know if that's exactly right for our model, but it's interesting. What we are learning is that as we do that though, it doesn't go left to right.
Like it doesn't just go, okay, once I get my adaptive cruise control, then I'm ready to go to sort of semi-autonomous. I think what we've got to do is prototype and try things at every point along that spectrum. I do think that push to the right with that autonomous being the right where the agent, the system is doing the work for them. The agent is getting, instead of the agent doing things, they are reviewing things. They are approving things.
I do think that's a model where, in many cases we want to head towards, but not necessarily in everything, right? We've talked about this personal relationship. Don't push me to autonomous if it's going to take away that personal relationship and that control that I have with their clients along the way. And so, I don't think it's linear. I think we're going to try things. We're going to find that some things our clients want to be more autonomous.
Data entry, the administrative burden, all the busy work, all the paperwork that they spend their time doing. I think that's going to be more headed towards autonomy, where I think the others are going to be much less than that. And they're going to have sort of more of a collaboration with the AI, if you will, to communicate, to choose the right plans, those types of things. I think the trick for us is going to always be how much AI helps here, how much AI helps there, and how do we find that balance so that that agent feels much more in control and much more on top of their book of business with all the right information at their fingertips, stuff they didn't have before. That's where I think we're going. And that's where again, that problem-first approach is really driving sort of what we're doing along the way.
CS: Yes, we're obviously testing these ideas, finding out what sticks, what doesn't, where we can drive value. Not to share too much, but I know going into BlocBuilder, which is just in a few weeks here, that we're going to actually be, I think, testing some concepts and actually getting some real-life, in-the-room feedback, which is weird in this day and age when everything's AI and it's all digital. So it'll be fun to do that in person, but like anything specific that you can share or tease us with, Scott, in terms of what that's going to look like at BlocBuilder?
SS: Yeah, I'm super excited coming up with BlocBuilder, but we're not waiting until BlocBuilder, right? We've been testing some of these ideas along the way. We just launched a Client Engagement Program where we're engaging with our clients and testing these ideas early. So if you haven't joined, if you're a client, please do join. We want to hear from you. You know, I would say big picture, Cory, is there are probably three areas I think about a lot.
- One is how do we reduce that administrative burden? And I'll come back to that in a second. That's number one.
- Number two, how do we surface what matters? There's data, there's insights in our clients' in their client relationship management. How do we surface that to our agents so that they can act on it? That's number two.
- And then number three, we're always going to be focused on saving people time. And I think that's a huge part of where we are.
And so those are sort of the three buckets that I'm thinking about right now. I do think there are a couple of things that we're going to talk about at BlocBuilder and show.
And I think, to your point, I love that it's in person, right? And hopefully that sort of gives everyone an idea of sort of the philosophy we bring, which is we're not just off in a lab building something and hoping it works, right? We are actively working with people. We're actually going to, I'll tease another thing. We're going to launch an "in the wild" program where our team is actually going to go out and spend time next to people, assuming they're okay with that, you know, with their permission to actually see how they use our products in the wild.
And that gives us a whole nother level to that. But as I think about BlocBuilder, there are two things that I'm super excited about. One, we all know that from a compliance perspective, you've got to record calls. Well, that's great, but there's a lot of data in that call. So again, as I think about other areas that our lives are being impacted by AI, that transcription and data and insights out of the call.
That's an area we're exploring and we're excited to put some things in front of our clients at BlocBuilder and get feedback. Are we right? Are we wrong? Where did we get it right? Where did we get it wrong? Because we don't care about just the, did AI do it well? We care about, does it work for you? That for me is one. The other one I get excited about is how can you ask your CRM questions and get insights? We launched what we call the Ask AMS+ Chatbot in December, and it's helping people understand how to use AMS+ in that example. But they're asking us other things that we don't handle yet. They're asking us to surface data that matters. And so I'm excited to explore that with our clients as well. And there are two or three other things we're looking at that we're going to get feedback. Look, I don't know what all the right answers are, but I do know how to get there. And we're going to work closely with our clients to figure that out and launch things that truly add value along the way.
CS: I love the approach. I will say that "in the wild" has always been, you know, one of my favorite things. Like in the early days of AgencyBloc, like we would spend a lot of time just sitting and watching our customers use our products. And I think you've even mentioned all these other tools. I think you said there's like 8.4 or something tools that they're also using outside of AgencyBloc. And so sometimes you don't even know about those other things. And actually the problem to solve might be in the interconnectivity or how data gets from point A to point B.
SS: Mm-hmm.
CS: So I just, love the approach. I love what you're doing with the team. I love how we're testing concepts and really leaning in with customers. I think it's at the core of like why this company has been successful and we're gonna continue to double down on that concept and I couldn't be more excited about that. So as we wrap up, Scott, any final words of wisdom to share any, I don't know if you've checked the news, is there any new AI things this morning that we need to be aware of?
SS: Yeah, if we there's already one that started this morning and there's probably another one coming later. You know, I guess the thing I would say is this. At the end of the day, our focus, just like it was in the beginning, is solving our customer problems, however we do that. And so I would almost tell our clients, right, and the industry to say, look, there's a lot of noise out there. There really is. There's a lot of noise. Every single day there's a press release or this or that. Look, we could write press releases all day long.
The reality is what we're focused on is trying to find the signal from the noise. What are the problems? What's the way in which we want to bring these out? And so, you I would almost say, look to us to help sort through all that noise and to then bring you things that are going to actually add value to what you're doing. We know that our clients are using ChatGPT outside of AgencyBloc. Great. They're using other tools outside of AgencyBloc. What we want to do is not just simplify your AMS+ or your AgencyBloc products.
We want to look around and make sure we simplify your world. That doesn't mean we're going to own everything. We're not. We're going to work really carefully with other products as well. But at the end of the day, what we want to do is make our clients successful in whatever way they want to be successful. Whether that's a small client that just wants more time. Whether it's a small client that wants to just keep their business going. Whether it's a larger client that's trying to grow. Like those are the things that we're focused on. And we see AgencyBloc and our products as a way to enable that.
And that's what we'll keep doing.
CS: All right, so if you're gonna be a BlocBuilder, you'll be able to share feedback in real time around some of the concepts we're testing. If not, we've got a Client Engagement Program that it sounds like Scott's created that you can join. if you're listening to this after BlocBuilder, obviously that's a great way to get connected with our team. So really appreciate the time, the discussion, Scott. It's exciting to see what's happening and we're gonna definitely buckle up. The change is not done yet.
SS: It's gonna be a ride, that's for sure. Thank you.
CS: All right, thanks so much.
Posted
on Friday, March 20, 2026
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