Personal AI agents can already gather driver and vehicle information, test coverage options and return quotes. But the final step—completing a purchase—still depends on checkout systems, consumer trust and licensed human involvement. Daniel Herrington, The Zebra’s chief AI officer, says the industry’s next challenge is building a safe, compliant path from comparison to transaction. The Zebra is an insurance comparison marketplace.
“We’ve mostly seen personal agents doing the time-consuming tedious work that consumers hate, like gathering vehicle and driver information, testing coverage options for prices, and then reporting options back to their users,” Herrington says. In a Nov. 5 follow-up, he said that over the prior few weeks, automated agents were comparing rates and completing applications at “more than twice the rate of traditional desktop users.” The comparison is company-reported and does not quantify the share of all quote traffic coming from agents; completing an application does not mean a policy was bound. He says The Zebra has begun allowing a small amount of traffic through infrastructure that lets a customer’s personal agent communicate with The Zebra’s licensed advisors, but agents are not yet completing transactions.
Herrington says more accurate, bindable quotes can require carriers to purchase third-party data such as motor vehicle records, which can cost up to $20 per quote. As a hypothetical, he says an agent requesting 40 quotes at $20 each would mean $800 in quoting expenses for carriers, although only one policy might be bought. The Zebra, he says, monitors its own look-to-book ratio and calls quotes only when a customer has a high propensity to bind.
“We don’t quite know yet,” Herrington says. He describes a growing chain involving a person, a personal agent, an insurer’s AI and a licensed advisor. At The Zebra, he says, no transaction is completed without a licensed advisor. That leaves regulators and market participants to work through licensing, consumer permissions, disclosures, privacy and recordkeeping as agent-led shopping develops.
Herrington says independent agencies may be able to ignore agentic shopping over the next 12 months, but argues that building a proprietary consumer-agent front door would mean competing with large technology companies. His recommendation is for agencies to connect to the platforms consumers choose, rather than build a rival personal AI agent.
Herrington says insurance platforms need infrastructure that lets agents interact directly and securely, rather than navigate websites like human users. In his Nov. 5 response, he said The Zebra was developing a Model Context Protocol server to give agents a more structured way to interact with its platform. He says the process must also verify consumer permissions, maintain records for oversight and involve licensed advisors where needed; fully autonomous shopping remains ahead.