Case Study
How The MJ Companies Uses Outmarket AI to Elevate Client Value, Leverage Institutional Knowledge, and Streamline Workflows
By Outmarket
Stats at a Glance:
4-8 hours down to 20-30 minutes: Reduction in time spent on complex legacy workflows and data analysis.
5 Minutes: The time it took to build a winning claim argument that previously required an entire evening of manual work.
Continuous Communication: The Outmarket engineering team meets regularly with The MJ Companies and delivers all-new capabilities in the product based on the agency’s feedback.
Company Overview:
Company: The MJ Companies
Key Stakeholder: Wes Edrington, Executive Vice President of Operations + Data
Specialization: Risk management consulting, commercial lines, personal lines, and employee benefits
About
The MJ Companies is a risk management consulting firm based in Carmel, Indiana. They position themselves as true consultants rather than purely transactional brokers, and their customers rely heavily on their expertise as a result. For The MJ Companies, real client value stems from their consultative impact and strategic recommendations, not just facilitating policies.
Challenge
Despite their focus on high-level consulting, The MJ Companies was weighed down by legacy operations and manual processes. Standard workflows required staff to spend four to eight hours combing through complex documents across multiple computer screens. Developing proposals was particularly painful; the process turned into a week-long “arts and crafts exercise” of constant formatting and back-and-forth quote revisions from carriers.
Beyond operational inefficiencies, the agency recognized a severe industry-wide talent risk. Relying on outdated insurance technology makes it difficult to attract and retain early-career professionals. Concurrently, the agency wanted to ensure their collective knowledge of their subject matter experts would empower the work of all associates and add value for all clients.
The Solution
The MJ Companies ran an evaluation process, running Outmarket in an A/B test against at least two other AI vendors. Within a couple of weeks, staff testers made it clear that Outmarket was a “runaway” favorite. The key differentiator was Outmarket’s deep, vertically integrated understanding of insurance workflows, setting it apart from competitors that possessed generic AI without industry context.
Edrington said the top-utilized Outmarket workflows include:
Quote Comparison: The agency now uses Outmarket to handle the quantitative back-and-forth financial data upfront, finalizing quotes before generating proposals to avoid constant formatting revisions.
Policy Analysis: Outmarket executes highly thorough reviews of exclusions and endorsements, allowing master-level technicians to provide coverage-level detail that was previously unrealistic to perform manually.
AI Assistant: The agency leverages Outmarket’s specialized conversational AI to allow younger, unvalidated producers to safely ask questions and learn about the insurance industry.
The Process
The MJ Companies took a unique, highly successful approach to implementation. Instead of forcing a massive change management effort, leadership rolled Outmarket out to a select group of “superusers,” treating it like an exclusive release. As employees heard success stories from their coworkers, the adoption grew organically, with staff actively asking for licenses.
Additionally, The MJ Companies works closely with the Outmarket engineering team to build the workflows of the future. Wes and his team bring workflow problems or “wild ideas” to Outmarket, and within brief 10-minute conversations, the Outmarket team understands the value, heads to the lab, and returns with a functional prototype.
The Outcomes
The adoption of Outmarket at The MJ Companies has delivered profound results across operational efficiency, employee experience, and knowledge transfer:
Massive Reduction in Task Time: Standard operational tasks that previously took four to eight hours have been whittled down to a 20-to-30-minute review exercise.
Rapid Claim Resolutions: In the personal lines department, an associate spent an entire evening (four to eight hours) trying to build an argument for a denied claim. Using Outmarket, MJ was able to organize an equally effective argument in just five minutes.
AI as a Talent Amplifier: Outmarket is actively serving as a teacher for early-career professionals, enabling them to pick up complex insurance skills at a rapid pace. The platform is also being used to codify subject matter expertise and institutional knowledge.
Elevating the Day-to-Day: By eliminating the need to hunt and peck for data across several different documents, the agency anticipates heavily shifting how account managers and producers spend their days. They are moving away from transactional data entry and maximizing risk analysis and strategic consulting.
The Client Impact
For The MJ Companies, the ultimate measure of any technological investment is how it improves outcomes for their clients and prospects. While Outmarket has driven significant internal efficiencies, the true value lies in how those streamlined workflows directly enhance the firm’s consultative capabilities and the overall client experience. By thoughtfully integrating AI into their operations, The MJ Companies is ensuring their audience receives more proactive, data-driven, and highly specialized service.
Actionable, Data-Driven Insights: Clients frequently look to The MJ Companies for advanced data utilization. By leveraging AI alongside their proprietary tools, the firm is translating massive amounts of complex data into clear insights. This allows clients to make more informed, strategic decisions.
Deepening Consultative Value: The operational time saved through AI is directly reinvested into the client relationship. By reducing the hours spent on routine data aggregation and policy comparisons, account managers and producers are shifting their focus entirely toward strategic consulting and complex risk analysis. In critical areas like claims resolution, AI acts as a powerful research assistant, swiftly surfacing relevant policy details so the firm’s experts can dedicate their time to evaluating nuances and building robust, highly customized advocacy strategies.
Scaling Institutional Expertise: A key priority for the firm is ensuring a seamless transfer of expertise across associates. This proactive approach guarantees that the collective wisdom of the firm’s top subject matter experts is accessible to the entire team, elevating the quality of advice every client receives.
A Commitment to Continuous Evolution: The MJ Companies views AI adoption not as a one-time upgrade, but as an ongoing journey. Currently in the early stages of this evolution, the firm is intentionally piloting new capabilities, skilling associates, and refining processes. Every workflow improvement and prototype developed with Outmarket is driven by a singular goal: continuously elevating both the associate capabilities and the direct value delivered to the client.
In Their Own Words
“We started hearing from our team, ‘I don’t really need to evaluate these things anymore. Outmarket is better than the other ones.’ Ultimately the differentiator that we kept hearing was ‘we really think that Outmarket understands the insurance workflows.’”
— Wes Edrington | Executive Vice President, Operations + Data, The MJ Companies
1. On AI as a Talent Amplifier
“I see AI as an amplifier. If you’re not an engineer, AI doesn’t make you an engineer. If you’re not an underwriter, AI doesn’t make you an underwriter. But what it can do is it can teach you things quicker. So if you’re a good learner, AI can be a great teacher and you can pick up skills that you may not have otherwise been able to pick up at a really rapid pace.”
2. On the Outmarket Relationship
“I don’t feel like I have to spend hours communicating our problems or the opportunities that we have in front of us in a five or ten minute conversation. They’re picking up on the value, they’re going back to the lab. And you know, within a week or two we’re seeing a prototype and we’re giving them feedback and it’s in production a lot of times within a month.”
3. On the Time-to-Value
“Some of the steps within our workflows may have taken four hours, eight hours to complete before and required just combing through documents, comparing them, having three screens open, and really whittled that down to a twenty minute exercise to just review the work.”
4. On Quality Control
“We’ve been really, really pleased with the quality of output. In some cases what Outmarket has generated was above and beyond what we would have probably done before AI entered the mix, simply due to time constraints.”
5. On Rapid Execution
“In just minutes they had a claim argument to get this claim accepted that was on par with what she had spent all night doing.”
Stats at a Glance:
4-8 hours down to 20-30 minutes: Reduction in time spent on complex legacy workflows and data analysis.
5 Minutes: The time it took to build a winning claim argument that previously required an entire evening of manual work.
Continuous Communication: The Outmarket engineering team meets regularly with The MJ Companies and delivers all-new capabilities in the product based on the agency’s feedback.
Company Overview:
Company: The MJ Companies
Key Stakeholder: Wes Edrington, Executive Vice President of Operations + Data
Specialization: Risk management consulting, commercial lines, personal lines, and employee benefits
About
The MJ Companies is a risk management consulting firm based in Carmel, Indiana. They position themselves as true consultants rather than purely transactional brokers, and their customers rely heavily on their expertise as a result. For The MJ Companies, real client value stems from their consultative impact and strategic recommendations, not just facilitating policies.
Challenge
Despite their focus on high-level consulting, The MJ Companies was weighed down by legacy operations and manual processes. Standard workflows required staff to spend four to eight hours combing through complex documents across multiple computer screens. Developing proposals was particularly painful; the process turned into a week-long “arts and crafts exercise” of constant formatting and back-and-forth quote revisions from carriers.
Beyond operational inefficiencies, the agency recognized a severe industry-wide talent risk. Relying on outdated insurance technology makes it difficult to attract and retain early-career professionals. Concurrently, the agency wanted to ensure their collective knowledge of their subject matter experts would empower the work of all associates and add value for all clients.
The Solution
The MJ Companies ran an evaluation process, running Outmarket in an A/B test against at least two other AI vendors. Within a couple of weeks, staff testers made it clear that Outmarket was a “runaway” favorite. The key differentiator was Outmarket’s deep, vertically integrated understanding of insurance workflows, setting it apart from competitors that possessed generic AI without industry context.
Edrington said the top-utilized Outmarket workflows include:
Quote Comparison: The agency now uses Outmarket to handle the quantitative back-and-forth financial data upfront, finalizing quotes before generating proposals to avoid constant formatting revisions.
Policy Analysis: Outmarket executes highly thorough reviews of exclusions and endorsements, allowing master-level technicians to provide coverage-level detail that was previously unrealistic to perform manually.
AI Assistant: The agency leverages Outmarket’s specialized conversational AI to allow younger, unvalidated producers to safely ask questions and learn about the insurance industry.
The Process
The MJ Companies took a unique, highly successful approach to implementation. Instead of forcing a massive change management effort, leadership rolled Outmarket out to a select group of “superusers,” treating it like an exclusive release. As employees heard success stories from their coworkers, the adoption grew organically, with staff actively asking for licenses.
Additionally, The MJ Companies works closely with the Outmarket engineering team to build the workflows of the future. Wes and his team bring workflow problems or “wild ideas” to Outmarket, and within brief 10-minute conversations, the Outmarket team understands the value, heads to the lab, and returns with a functional prototype.
The Outcomes
The adoption of Outmarket at The MJ Companies has delivered profound results across operational efficiency, employee experience, and knowledge transfer:
Massive Reduction in Task Time: Standard operational tasks that previously took four to eight hours have been whittled down to a 20-to-30-minute review exercise.
Rapid Claim Resolutions: In the personal lines department, an associate spent an entire evening (four to eight hours) trying to build an argument for a denied claim. Using Outmarket, MJ was able to organize an equally effective argument in just five minutes.
AI as a Talent Amplifier: Outmarket is actively serving as a teacher for early-career professionals, enabling them to pick up complex insurance skills at a rapid pace. The platform is also being used to codify subject matter expertise and institutional knowledge.
Elevating the Day-to-Day: By eliminating the need to hunt and peck for data across several different documents, the agency anticipates heavily shifting how account managers and producers spend their days. They are moving away from transactional data entry and maximizing risk analysis and strategic consulting.
The Client Impact
For The MJ Companies, the ultimate measure of any technological investment is how it improves outcomes for their clients and prospects. While Outmarket has driven significant internal efficiencies, the true value lies in how those streamlined workflows directly enhance the firm’s consultative capabilities and the overall client experience. By thoughtfully integrating AI into their operations, The MJ Companies is ensuring their audience receives more proactive, data-driven, and highly specialized service.
Actionable, Data-Driven Insights: Clients frequently look to The MJ Companies for advanced data utilization. By leveraging AI alongside their proprietary tools, the firm is translating massive amounts of complex data into clear insights. This allows clients to make more informed, strategic decisions.
Deepening Consultative Value: The operational time saved through AI is directly reinvested into the client relationship. By reducing the hours spent on routine data aggregation and policy comparisons, account managers and producers are shifting their focus entirely toward strategic consulting and complex risk analysis. In critical areas like claims resolution, AI acts as a powerful research assistant, swiftly surfacing relevant policy details so the firm’s experts can dedicate their time to evaluating nuances and building robust, highly customized advocacy strategies.
Scaling Institutional Expertise: A key priority for the firm is ensuring a seamless transfer of expertise across associates. This proactive approach guarantees that the collective wisdom of the firm’s top subject matter experts is accessible to the entire team, elevating the quality of advice every client receives.
A Commitment to Continuous Evolution: The MJ Companies views AI adoption not as a one-time upgrade, but as an ongoing journey. Currently in the early stages of this evolution, the firm is intentionally piloting new capabilities, skilling associates, and refining processes. Every workflow improvement and prototype developed with Outmarket is driven by a singular goal: continuously elevating both the associate capabilities and the direct value delivered to the client.
In Their Own Words
“We started hearing from our team, ‘I don’t really need to evaluate these things anymore. Outmarket is better than the other ones.’ Ultimately the differentiator that we kept hearing was ‘we really think that Outmarket understands the insurance workflows.’”
— Wes Edrington | Executive Vice President, Operations + Data, The MJ Companies
1. On AI as a Talent Amplifier
“I see AI as an amplifier. If you’re not an engineer, AI doesn’t make you an engineer. If you’re not an underwriter, AI doesn’t make you an underwriter. But what it can do is it can teach you things quicker. So if you’re a good learner, AI can be a great teacher and you can pick up skills that you may not have otherwise been able to pick up at a really rapid pace.”
2. On the Outmarket Relationship
“I don’t feel like I have to spend hours communicating our problems or the opportunities that we have in front of us in a five or ten minute conversation. They’re picking up on the value, they’re going back to the lab. And you know, within a week or two we’re seeing a prototype and we’re giving them feedback and it’s in production a lot of times within a month.”
3. On the Time-to-Value
“Some of the steps within our workflows may have taken four hours, eight hours to complete before and required just combing through documents, comparing them, having three screens open, and really whittled that down to a twenty minute exercise to just review the work.”
4. On Quality Control
“We’ve been really, really pleased with the quality of output. In some cases what Outmarket has generated was above and beyond what we would have probably done before AI entered the mix, simply due to time constraints.”
5. On Rapid Execution
“In just minutes they had a claim argument to get this claim accepted that was on par with what she had spent all night doing.”
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Outmarket AI raises $34.5M Series B to fuel the AI Operating System for Insurance.
Outmarket AI raises $34.5M Series B to fuel the AI Operating System for Insurance.
AI for insurance brokerages. Trusted by 300+ agencies. SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Certified, ISO/IEC 42001 Certified, and HIPAA-compliant.
AI for insurance brokerages. Trusted by 300+ agencies. SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Certified, ISO/IEC 42001 Certified, and HIPAA-compliant.
AI for insurance brokerages. Trusted by 300+ agencies. SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Certified, ISO/IEC 42001 Certified, and HIPAA-compliant.
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