Scout InsurTech Interview with Relay AI

Relay AI automates home and auto quoting for personal lines agencies, gathering client and policy details from calls, emails, and the agency's AMS and then completing raters and carrier portals end to end. Chris Luiz sat down with Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Ye to learn how Relay is impacting the industry.

Who are your clients?

“We work with personal lines independent agencies.”

What does your product do?

“Relay is quoting automation, built around three product lines. The first is new business quoting. We tap into an agency's phone system and email, then fill out quotes automatically on the rater and carrier portals. The second does the same thing for remarkets. We requote using AI, with browser automation that goes into the carrier portal and the rater and fills out all of the information. The third is a voice agent that can handle the process over the phone. Imagine it's 10 p.m. and someone calls the agency. AI can answer the phone, collect basic information, and get a preliminary quote sent out.”

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

“I'd say inside the industry. My own background is its own story, but from the start we set out to work with insurance agencies, and that's who we continue to serve.”

What growth milestones have you achieved over the last 12 months?

“The company has only been around for a little under six months, so for us the most important growth metric is client success. Every client we've worked with is very happy. About a month ago, we published our first case study with Robert Grandy, Agency Principal at Members Assurance, a medium-sized agency based in Portsmouth, Virginia. You can find that video on our website.”

Within your domain, what are the current challenges facing the industry?

“From talking to a lot of independent agencies, the biggest concern is that they want to keep owning their business. There's a lot of private equity coming in and trying to buy these agencies, and independents worry about being able to innovate as fast as firms with a ton of capital behind them.

On the producer side, people are simply overwhelmed. The market has gone from hard to soft, which makes it easier to remarket and find better rates. As a result, we're seeing agencies with 10 remarkets every day on top of all the new quotes coming in. Almost every agency I talk to has an activity task list in their AMS that runs several pages long. The backlog is beyond belief.

So the core challenge is time. On the growth and sales side, and on the retention and servicing side, there's very little time in the day for the number of clients agents need to handle, especially in personal lines.”

How does Relay AI take a unique approach to providing value?

“There are a couple of other companies tackling quoting, but none are addressing the whole end-to-end process. That means gathering information from the source, like a phone call, then researching the web. Our biggest sources are Zillow, Google Maps, and state permit records. From there, we use all of that information to go into the rater and the carrier portals and fill everything out.

The goal is that all the producer needs to do is review the quote, send it out, and talk to the client. That's where people want to spend their time: selling and advising, not manually entering information. We're focused on giving agents as much time back as possible so they can work on what's most valuable to them.”

What inspired the team to start this company?

“A while back, I did AI deployment consulting for a private equity fund. I would advise their portfolio companies on the most important processes to automate, then build those solutions out for them, from AI voice tools that answer the phone to AI note-taking apps. That work gave me exposure to a wide range of industries.

The biggest reason I landed on insurance was the opportunity. There's still so much manual work being done, and much of it is pure information transfer: entering information onto a screen, or figuring out where to focus in a 200-page document. There's a natural fit for automation there.

Over time, I've also come to really appreciate the people. Insurance is incredibly connected. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. One of our clients, Daniel Groff, runs American Agents Alliance, a major West Coast conference with around 4,000 attendees, and walking the conference floor with him, it seems like he knows everyone. It's a tight-knit space, and that's something I value.”

Can you share any goals over the next 12 months?

“Over the next six months, we're focused on a careful rollout. We're not ready to scale rapidly and bring on every agency in the country. We're looking for tech-forward agencies that want to work alongside us as partners, helping us fit our system into their process more cleanly and ultimately save their producers a ton of time.

I started a company before that used AI to answer the phone for plumbers and electricians, and the biggest lesson I took from that experience is to find your first 10 to 20 key supporters. These are the clients who will go to bat for you, whom you know deeply, and who are extremely happy with your work. They become your source of credibility, and credibility comes from putting in the work and doing right by your clients. After that, our goal is to build a system that's more plug-and-play for agencies across the country.”

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