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Reporting and analysis on the deals, pricing, and coverage trends shaping commercial insurance.
Article · Aug 14, 2026 · 9 min read
Insurance Automation That Knows Where to Stop: Inside ALKEME's AI Playbook
Most insurance automation conversations stall at one of two extremes: none of it is real yet, or all of it is about to replace everybody. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt talk with somebody who has actually shipped AI inside a working agency rather than sold it from the vendor side. Ryan Deeds, Head of AI at ALKEME Insurance, has automated a live piece of the renewal process, moved an entire band of small accounts onto an automated servicing track, and drawn a deliberate line where the software stops and a person picks up the phone. The interesting question, as Dowson framed it at the top of the episode, is not what you can automate. It is where you choose not to.
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Article · Aug 5, 2026 · 12 min read
Your AI Vendor Has a Supply Chain: Three Questions to Ask Before You Buy
Nearly every vendor selling into commercial insurance now mentions AI somewhere in the pitch. Very few of them will tell a buyer which part of an answer was calculated and which part was generated, and that single distinction is the most useful tool an insurance AI vendor evaluation can give you. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, host Katie Dowson sits down with David Haddad, head of product engineering at Advocate Technologies, to work through what actually goes into building AI software for a regulated market, and how a broker, lender, or servicer sitting through a demo can tell a real system from a thin wrapper. The premise of the conversation is that the model is the least interesting part of the product. Models improve every few months, and that improvement arrives whether or not the team using them is ready for it. What determines whether the software can be trusted is everything built around the model: deciding what it is allowed to do, knowing when it is wrong, and staying upright when something changes underneath you.
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Article · Jul 29, 2026 · 10 min read
MGAs and Fronting Carriers: Who Is Behind Your Commercial Insurance Policy?
Your renewal arrives from the same broker you have used for years. The number is competitive, the paperwork looks like every other commercial insurance policy you have ever received, and so you bind it and move on. Why wouldn't you? Here is the problem. Almost nobody stops to ask who is actually standing behind that paper, and the honest answer is increasingly that the company named on your declarations page neither priced your risk nor holds it. A managing general agent underwrote you, a fronting carrier lent its name to the policy, and reinsurers you will never be told about are the ones with money at stake. That chain is invisible from the buyer's seat, and it can reprice or disappear on you at renewal for reasons that have nothing to do with your account. On this episode of The Advocate Insurance Desk, co-hosts Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt walk through how the MGA and fronting structure actually works, what happened when a reinsurance intermediary collapsed in 2023, and the three questions you can answer tonight from a document already in your hand.
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