Surviving the Holiday Rush: How AI Gives Insurance Teams the Gift of Relief

The end of each year brings the same challenges: heavy renewal cycles, weather-driven claim surges, last-minute submissions, and holiday staffing gaps. Traditional fixes like overtime, temporary staff, or BPOs often result in employee fatigue, inconsistent service, and frustrated customers.

This year, resolve to be resilient! Let AI-powered agents be your secret Santa, delivering a scalable way to manage volume, and prevent worker burnout – without sacrificing service quality to make the year-end a true celebration... and a LOT less stressful. 

The Year-End Rush: Insurance’s True Test of Resilience

For those outside of insurance, the year-end crunch is hard to fully appreciate. For those of us who have lived it, it’s predictable and punishing. Every year-end brings intense volume spikes in:

• Renewals: With many policies renewing on January 1, underwriters are inundated by exposure updates, supplemental applications, and broker demands. Miss a step, and you risk losing accounts or underpricing renewals.
• Weather-driven claims: Winter storms, freezes, and floods trigger spikes in FNOL volume, paralyzing adjuster teams. 
• Holiday backlog: Increased year-end workloads could cause delays to essential policyholder services, like endorsements or COIs.   
• Email overload: Just sorting through submissions, change requests, and correspondence from brokers and agents can be a full-time job.
• New business & FNOL intake: Submissions don’t stop coming just because it’s the holidays. Intake bottlenecks can stall growth, frustrate brokers, and slow down insureds in moments of need.

Insurance leaders face the same December dilemma...budget for more people (and overtime) to address these issues, or just accept starting the new year with massive business backlogs? 

Where AI Agents Can Make the Biggest Impact

Insurers care about capacity, profitability, compliance, and customer experience. AI agents directly support these (and other) priorities in ways unimagined even a few years ago.

1. Accelerate renewal processing 

AI agents can route routine renewals for straight-through processing, as well as extract exposures from broker submissions flag material changes, and automatically send requests for missing information. With AI, underwriters can focus on accounts requiring their expertise while AI handles the clerical lift to improve retention and pricing accuracy.

2. Delight policyholders with fast claim settlements

When FNOL volume spikes after storms or other widespread loss events, AI agents can create claims files, classify documents, extract data, and flag potential subrogation or legal demands to cut cycle times and boost customer trust.

3. Give the gift of a backlog-free holiday

COI requests, endorsements, billing questions don’t stop just because it’s December. AI agents keep things running smoothly 24-7-365 so your people can get needed family time without returning to a glut of unfinished business. 

4. Unwrap more data for better decisions

Those broker submissions that come in as 20-page PDFs with attachments galore? AI agents read, extract, and route information directly into underwriting systems cutting response times to bind and quote more business before Jan 1!  

5. Create a virtual holiday open house for new business

AI agents triage submissions, auto-decline risks that don’t fit your appetite, and rapidly move conforming business into underwriting pipelines.  

Other Key Ways Insurance AI Delivers at the Holidays – and All Year ‘Round 

For insurance leaders, the shift to AI isn’t just about technology. It’s about strategic resilience. Powered by AI, insurers can expect:

• Expanded capacity without additional headcount. AI scales elastically when you need it most.
• Improved expense ratios. Automating the clerical layer reduces the need for costly seasonal staffing or outsourcing.
• More successful customer retention. Streamlined, more accurate renewals keep business on the books.
• Claims cost control. Early detection of subrogation opportunities and hidden details in legal demands cut claims leakage.
• Simplified, more effective compliance and bias mitigation. Audit trails, data transparency, and model explainability reduce regulatory risk.
• Improved work experience. Freeing staff from low-value work improves morale to help insurers compete in a talent-strained market.

Any one of these outcomes would brighten an insurer’s operations at year-end. With AI-powered workflows, all are within reach, a gift that can carry well into the new year. 

6 Smart AI Adoption Strategies 

If you’re considering AI agents for these (or other use cases), here are six important considerations: 

1. Start with one operational pain point. Pick an area with easily defined ROI, e.g. COIs, FNOL setup, or submission or renewal intake.
2. Maintain human oversight. Augment human expertise. Escalate exceptions and let people focus where judgment matters.
3. Insist on auditability. Regulators will want to know how decisions are made. Choose transparent AI solutions that deliver explainability.
4. Measure relentlessly. Make your business case with hard numbers by tracking throughput, error rates, cycle times, leakage, and other metrics. 
5. Prioritize change management. Teams will support transformation when they understand how AI will support them.
6. Scale iteratively. Build trust and change momentum by proving value before expanding scope and use cases.

If you have already begun adopting AI, you are giving your teams and customers a gift that pays dividends all year long. And if you are still in the consideration phase, commit to fast-tracking your AI transformation. 

For decades, insurers have turned to increased headcounts and heavy overtime to power through the year-end crunch. Today, AI offers a better way to deal with routine tasks, so your teams can focus on judgment, service, and relationship-building, making for a holiday season worth celebrating – and a successful new year! 

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season from the entire Roots team. We look forward to sharing more AI knowledge and insights in the new year as we continue working together to build a stronger, more intelligent future for our industry.