AI powered workflow automations for insurance brokers

When they met as graduate students at the Stanford School of Business, Carl Ziadé and Jean-Pierre Vertil joked that they held the record for the longest walks on campus. Some of their walk-and-talks lasted up to three hours. During these meetings, their friendship set the tone for a business partnership. Today, their insurtech startup, Gaya.ai, is making waves in the industry as a solution for automating and streamlining tedious data-entry tasks for insurance brokers.

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The Gaya co-founders have always enjoyed seeking out problems and brainstorming solutions. The two are connected by their entrepreneurial nature and shared experience. Both are immigrants, Ziadé from Lebanon and Vertil from Haiti. As graduate students, their first collaboration was to set up a way for students in the business school to connect and share cars. 

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One project led to another, and the two pivoted to a new venture, Gayafi, aimed to streamline car loan refinancing through insurance agents. Federal rate hikes in the post-pandemic world led them to rethink their approach, which steered them to an opportunity to create a SaaS solution for an insurance agency. Along with the rise of large language models (LLMs), this sparked the idea for their next big project, Gaya.ai.

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“We were building something else and we stumbled on a major problem plaguing the industry—redundant data entry,” says Ziadé. “Brokers spend 50 percent of their time quoting policies, meaning the process is largely manual. Brokers have been spending their time filling carrier portals manually with the same customer information. They have tried using API-led comparative raters, but are not happy with the price accuracy, carrier coverage, and consistency. They are having to copy and paste up to 250 fields per carrier one by one, five times, to compare five quotes and get back to their clients with the optimal policy.”

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Initially, this was the problem Gaya set out to solve. Instead of the tedious task of copying and pasting one-to-one across carrier portals, Gaya devised a way for agents and brokers to capture all of the necessary details in one go, which they call “super-copy” and then “super-paste”  to each carrier portal to autofill all the necessary details in one click.

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“It is essentially like Google Autofill on steroids,” says Ziadé. “It cuts down on agents’ quoting time by more than 50 percent.”

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The unique value of Gaya.ai

“Gaya allows insurance brokers to extract information from any document (policy declaration page, intake quote sheet, photos of driver’s licenses) or from any web-system, and super paste on any carrier portal,” says Ziadé. He outlines three main ways Gaya sets itself apart from the competition:

• Use case differentiation. “We are insurance specific. When Gaya super copies something, it matches it to a Gaya dictionary that is line-specific. From that, Gaya can go and paste it on other portals that have similar fields. Fields do not have to be exact.  AI can understand the semantic differences and match relevant fields together.”
• Product differentiation. “Agents and brokers can use Gaya to super copy from anywhere and to super paste anywhere. Customers can also opt-in to use different parts of Gaya by employing its public APIs. They can use Gaya’s copy engine to extract information from any unstructured document and send it in a structured way through a webhook/API to their internal system (e.g., CRM). They can also send structured content through an API/ webhook and use Gaya’s paste engine to autofill carriers and raters portals.” 
• Tech differentiation. “We are AI powered. We use LLMs and computer vision to parse complex insurance documents and use extracted info to help brokers fill carrier portals faster.”

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Gaya has already seen success with several agencies, reducing quote time by as much as 80 percent. 

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“We offer a unique value,” says Ziadé. “Horizontal solutions like Magical and Bardeen offer a super copy super paste tool, but they are not at all geared to insurance and are very basic. They are mostly used by recruiters to scrape info out of LinkedIn, for example. Hawklink by Hawksoft can only read what Hawksoft AMS has, and it can't paste on drop-downs, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc., so the experience is sub-par. Then, you have the comparative raters that can be thought of as a competitor as they help reduce repetitive entry on carrier portals. But the coverage in commercial lines is low. In personal lines, brokers are increasingly not satisfied with price accuracy returned by raters, and carriers are pulling out in many states from raters (e.g., Natgen), and many others are not on a rater (e.g., Chubb, Erie).”

This is just the starting point

Gaya.ai has gained significant interest among brokers and investors, with a growing waitlist and early investment from industry players and the potential to revolutionize the insurance industry. 

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“We are just in the beginning stages,” according to Ziadé. “Streamlining quoting is just the beginning of our plans,” he says. “We are ultimately building an AI copilot for insurance brokers. They are advisors. They shouldn’t be spending time on data entry for quoting, and they shouldn’t be clicking on carrier websites to service policies.” 

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He adds, “But for now, we are laser focused on delivering  on the promise. We are doing a phenomenal job now in the personal lines, home and auto insurance with 100+ carriers covered already. Our next step is commercial. We are now in beta for commercial lines and are doing a lot of experiments for a product that will help agents service policies.” 

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“We joined BTV because they are one of the best insurtech accelerators,” says Ziadé. “We started by serving the small shops, and we love working with them, but now we are also ready to go up-market and serve large regional brokers next. We have some great pilots in place with many BTV partners, and we’re excited about the partnerships we will be establishing with other cohort members. Our startup now has 80 strong agencies and 100+ in the waitlist.” 

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Helping brokers better serve clients

Gaya’s journey has been one of learning, adapting, and relentless innovation. They remain committed to disrupting the intersection of technology and insurance. with aspirations to expand into other industries in the future where data entry and repetitive processes exist

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“The insurance industry is great. I like it a lot for one reason: I am an immigrant, and we don’t have a deep insurance market where I come from. Insurance is the lubricant of society and of capitalism. It allows people and businesses to feel comfortable taking risks and dealing with strangers,” says Ziadé. 

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“The agent/ broker is the middle man, the person who makes it happen,” he adds. “We want the agent  to be able to spend less time keying information and doing data entry so they can do the important job of caring for the customer and growing their business.Gaya helps make this happen.”  

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If you are interested in reaching out for more information about Gaya.ai, use the following links:

• Website: gaya.ai
• Email: carl@gaya.ai
• LinkedIn: Carl Ziade
• LinkedIn Company Page: Gaya.ai

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