Clementine CEO: Automate Back-Office Work, Not Client Relationships

The automation paradox in insurance brokerage

Insurance brokerages are automating the wrong parts of their business, according to Curtis Samoy, founder and CEO of Clementine. Rather than deploying AI and automation tools on customer-facing work, Samoy argues brokerages should focus these technologies exclusively on back-office processes that don't differentiate them from direct insurers.

The distinction matters because it goes to the heart of what justifies a broker's existence. "Sending emails, writing blog posts or running your website's chat tools are part of what differentiates brokers from directs," Samoy said, as first reported by Insurance Business Canada. When those interactions get handed to machines, the value gap between brokers and direct insurers collapses.

Why it matters

As AI adoption accelerates across financial services, this represents a strategic fork in the road for brokerages. The choice isn't whether to automate, but what to automate—and getting it wrong could commoditize the broker channel itself by eliminating the judgment and personalized advice clients pay for.

Where the line sits

Samoy's position is pointed for someone whose company sells automation technology. He frames the issue around what clients are actually buying: wisdom, experience, and situation-specific advice rather than transactional efficiency. "If a bot can answer their questions and write their business in every sense except a legal requirement to speak to a human, then I'd argue they should be buying direct anyway," he said.

When pressed on exactly which interactions are safe to automate, Samoy declined to prescribe rules. That decision, he said, belongs to each brokerage. "We at Clementine try to automate the things that brokers are currently spending time on"—the mundane back-end processes—"rather than telling them what should and shouldn't be automated."

That line sits in different places for different brokerages, and Samoy sees that variation as a feature of the channel, not a bug. While brokers talk about wanting uniformity and shared data, in practice they want to differentiate themselves and operate on their own terms.

The hiring shift

Automating routine work changes who brokerages should hire, Samoy argues. Soft skills are becoming the real differentiator as hard skills matter less, and automation should let brokerages lean into that rather than staff up against administrative volume.

"You get to hire the people that make a difference to your customers," he said. The relief is that growth doesn't require adding rows of administrative processing roles. Brokerages can continue hiring for the roles they always have: customer-facing producers and advisers who grow the book and establish the brokerage as a trusted partner.

Samoy noted that few people in the broker channel do purely routine work. Reception and front-desk staff, for example, handle administrative tasks between answering calls and greeting walk-ins. Automating the administrative piece frees capacity for higher-value interactions.

Trust over features

Underlying Samoy's argument is a view of where a technology vendor's value actually sits. For Clementine, he said, it's the relationship and trust ahead of any single feature. He doesn't envision a future where all data flows freely and every brokerage operates identically—that would devalue the broker channel itself.

New and unique challenges will keep arriving, and brokers will bring them to vendors they trust. "Even if the stuff we're doing now isn't valuable in five years, 10 years, we'll find other ways to add value," Samoy said. "As long as we're someone that brokerages will carry on a relationship with and continue doing business with, that's all we can hope for."

These details were first reported by Insurance Business Canada.