84% of Large Brokerages Are Already Using AI. What Are the Other 16% Waiting For?
Mike Dooley
The IIABA and Reagan Consulting Best Practices Study for 2025 found that 84% of brokerages over $100M have now invested in AI. The gap between early movers and the rest is widening every quarter.
There is a version of the AI conversation in insurance that has been happening since 2022. It is largely theoretical, full of caveats and tends to end with "we'll revisit this next year." That version of the conversation is over.
The 2025 IIABA and Reagan Consulting Best Practices Study found that 84% of brokerages generating over $100M in premium have already invested in AI in some form. This is not a prediction. This is the current state of the market.
What they're actually using it for
The most common AI applications in insurance right now fall into three categories: document processing and policy administration, claims triage and fraud detection, and client-facing communication. Voice AI sits in the third category and is the fastest-growing area of investment because its ROI is the most immediately measurable.
Unlike AI that improves back-office processes over 12–18 months, a voice AI system that captures inbound calls and runs outbound sequences produces quantifiable output from week one. Every booked appointment is attributable. Every prevented missed call is trackable.
The competitive compounding effect
What the data doesn't fully capture is what happens to brokerages that delay while competitors adopt. AI systems improve with volume. An AI that has handled 10,000 insurance calls is meaningfully better at qualification, objection handling and routing than one that has handled 100. Brokerages that move now are building a data advantage that compounds over time.
The brokerages that move later are not just starting from zero — they are starting from behind an opponent who has been training their system for 12 months on real calls from the same market.
For smaller brokerages, the window is still open
The 84% figure applies to large brokerages. Among firms with 5–50 advisors — the backbone of the UK and US independent broker market — adoption is still in early stages. This is the window. The brokerages that establish AI-driven operations at this stage of the market do not just catch up to larger competitors. They leapfrog them on the metrics that matter most to clients: response time, availability and consistency.
The question is no longer whether to invest in AI. It is whether to do it before or after your competitors do.
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