What to Build vs Buy: Lessons from AI Agents in Production at a Major Insurer

This is a sponsored blog post by AI software company ElevenLabs.

The first generation of automation in financial services was a cost decision, and customers could tell.

Decision tree chatbots and IVR menus reduced volume by deflecting it, and the experience taught a generation of policyholders and account holders to say “agent” and wait for the queue.

Institutions are adopting AI agents for a different reason:a better category of customer experience: every contact resolved on the spot, at any hour, in any channel, or handed to a person who already knows the customer and the situation – with the savings reinvested in the human service that matters most.

Admiral, one of Europe’s largest insurance groups, frames its own ambition as building the most trusted customer experience in insurance, and is explicit that this is a customer experience transformation.

That framing matters for the question every institution asks – build in-house or buy a platform – because the two goals set very different bars. 

Automation built to cut cost only has to be cheaper than the queue. An agent built to carry the customer relationship has to be as good as the business’ best people, or better.

Once that is the bar, the useful question is no longer build versus buy. It is which parts of the experience only the institution can supply, and which parts are already solved.