“Speed Wins”: How Commercial Insurance Associates Uses Outmarket AI to Win Business and Win It Fast

Stats at a Glance:

• 1 Hour to 6 Minutes: Reduction in time spent on most loss analyses.

• 2 to 4 Hours: Estimated daily time savings per person using the platform.

• 70 to 75: Number of employees currently equipped with Outmarket seats.

Company Overview:

• Company: Commercial Insurance Associates (CIA)

• Key Stakeholder: Kevin Hawkinson, Director of Carrier Relations

• Specialization: Top 100 firm

About

Commercial Insurance Associates (CIA) is a top 100 firm based out of Brentwood, Tennessee. The brokerage handles complex commercial policies, and with approximately 130 employees places around $400M in premium, annually. In the fast-paced insurance industry, CIA operates by a core motto: “Speed Wins.” This phrase represents their deep commitment to quick responsiveness, accuracy, and providing top-tier service to their clients.

Challenge

CIA was in the middle of a journey looking for software solutions to solve problems like proposal generation, for which they found there wasn’t a great solution available at the time. Simultaneously, the broader insurance industry began talking heavily about AI, prompting CIA to figure out how to leverage this new technology to save time, energy, and accelerate their business.

The insurance world inherently requires tasks that just take time, such as manually comparing policies, comparing quotes, and reviewing various applicants. Employees were spending hours looking over policies and contracts, performing manual entry that was tedious and laborious. The challenge was finding a way to reduce this massive manual workload so employees could redirect their energy toward higher-value tasks, all while enhancing the speed and service quality that defines CIA’s operations.

The Solution

CIA was introduced to Outmarket through an old colleague of Kevin Hawkinson’s, and the platform proved to be a perfect “match made in heaven,” answering many of CIA’s analysis, comparison, and input tasks. Instead of just a generic AI trying to find an answer, Outmarket brings multiple key workflows together in one platform built specifically for the insurance industry.

Hawkinson’s top-utilized Outmarket workflows include:

• Policy & Quote Comparison: The team uses the platform to compare policies and quotes. This significantly reduces the time required for these tasks.

• Prospect Generation: Sales producers type in the name of a prospect to research it. Outmarket then builds out a complete risk profile and generates a checklist of questions and items to look for.

• Loss Summary Analysis: Employees use Outmarket to analyze hundreds of pages of loss runs in minutes instead of hours.

• Contract Review & File Audits: CIA heavily utilizes Outmarket for reviewing contracts internally and for clients. They focus specifically on indemnity language and insurance requirements. They also use it for file audits to cross-check policies before they go out the door, ensuring complete accuracy.

The Process

To ensure successful adoption, CIA didn’t just buy the software and throw it at its employees. Instead, they first tested it with a pilot team. This approach helped secure buy-in, allowed employees to provide critical feedback, and cultivated a group of internal champions and subject matter experts. These internal experts could then help train the rest of the staff and provide guidance through the adoption process.

Change is always hard, and CIA experienced initial struggles with adoption due to natural hesitancy and fear of being replaced; however, adoption ultimately snowballed through an increasingly frequent series of “aha moments.” Team members would do something cool in Outmarket, jump up over their cubicles to tell someone else, and cross-pollinate that information. This snowball effect continued, and the whole team soon realized how capable and flexible the tool was. CIA also noted that the Outmarket team are great, mutually beneficial partners who provide tremendous service, listen to feedback, and develop custom workflows.

The Outcomes

The adoption of Outmarket at Commercial Insurance Associates has delivered profound results across operations, efficiency, and employee satisfaction:

• Massive Time Savings: Outmarket saves an estimated two to four hours a day per person across the 70+ individuals using it. This frees up immense energy and effort for other tasks.

• Faster Client Service: Outmarket enables CIA to quickly build risk profiles, go out to market, get quotes back, and quickly analyze and propose the best option for the client. This directly supports their “speed wins” motto and improves the perception of service for clients.

• Winning and Retaining Business: By allowing employees to get back to clients faster with better information, Outmarket has directly aided in retaining existing clients. It also provides deeper market intelligence to help secure new business from carrier partners.

• Happier Staff and Better Work-Life Balance: In one remarkable instance, an assistant client manager had been grinding away at a loss summary analysis. She threw the hundreds of pages into Outmarket, and six minutes later, the task was completed and verified as accurate. This allowed her to step away from her desk, stop grinding, and enjoy a team barbecue lunch.

In Their Own Words

“We think that it’s a vital tool, and I think the team would probably kick me out the door if I tried to take it away from them at this point.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates

1. On Solving the Core Problem of Manual Work

“In the insurance world, a lot of what we do just takes time. So a lot of it is comparing policies, comparing quotes, comparing various different applicants. What we got out of it was we reduced that time span significantly. The thing that we couldn’t measure was how much the team enjoyed not having to do all of the manual entry and just spending hours looking over policies and contracts.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates

2. On Scaling and ROI

“When we rolled it out I presented to our CEO that we thought [Outmarket] would probably save two to four hours a day per person. So for instance, the scale on our side was we were going to roll it out to 70 people. So if you say 70 people save two to four hours a day, that adds up very quickly, especially over the course of a year.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates

3. On Winning New Business

“Outmarket has helped us retain clients by enabling us to do the other things better. We now have quicker information, better information, deeper information to go out to our clients and go out to our carrier partners, providing them what they need to get us quotes back quickly and secure those clients with that information that was used.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates

4. On Fostering a Culture of Innovation

“Right now there are a lot of AI tools and everybody’s talking about AI. Everybody’s saying AI. What Outmarket does is it brings it all together under one platform and it’s built for insurance, which is what we do. It has many different workflows that we do day in and day out, and it guides you in a way to make it easy to use.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates

5. On Quality Control

“We use it for file audits and file reviews […] It’s very helpful being able to cross-check our policies as they go out the door and then as we bind them up to make sure they’re accurate and to make sure that we’re dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s.”

— Kevin Hawkinson | Director of Carrier Relations, Commercial Insurance Associates