The MGAA Market Briefing recently asked a simple but vital question for insurers: Could AI agents really improve online sales performance - or is it just hype?
OpenDialog’s Chief Customer Officer, Danny Major, and Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Dr Ron Ashri, joined the session to share their perspective. Here are the key insights from their discussion.
Why do so many online insurance quotes get abandoned?
It’s a challenge most insurers know well:
- More than 70% of online quotes are abandoned before a policy is purchased.
And when you dig into the reasons why, four big themes emerge:
- Complexity – Insurance journeys are full of jargon and detailed questions.
- Limited support – FAQs rarely help, and live chat isn’t always available.
- Lack of personalisation – Digital journeys don’t adapt to individual customers.
- Regulatory constraints – Unlike retail, insurers can’t just recommend freely.
That leaves many customers lost, frustrated, or unconvinced – and they simply drop out.
Could an AI agent help?
That was the next big question.
Ron explained that when we talk about an “AI agent,” we mean more than just a chatbot. It’s not just the interface the customer sees, but the reasoning and knowledge that sits behind it.
The hypotheses OpenDialog set out to test were:
- Can an AI agent deliver a more personalised experience?
- Can it provide real-time sales support, preventing drop-outs?
- Can it guide customers compliantly through complex journeys?
- And can it all be done quickly, without months of IT effort?
Meet Selma: The AI Sales Agent
To put those ideas into practice, OpenDialog built Selma, an AI sales agent designed for insurance.
Selma works by combining four things:
- Customer knowledge – policy documents, FAQs, rules.
- User-specific data – details from the quote journey, like vehicle type.
- Behavioural triggers – spotting when a customer hesitates or rejects an add-on.
- Sales persuasion tactics – the same nudges a human sales agent would use.
The results? In live insurer deployments, Selma delivered:
- 15% increase in conversions
- 12% uplift in add-on revenue
And all of this happened within just a few weeks of going live.
Engagement drives conversion
Danny highlighted one of the most interesting findings: customers who engage with Selma – even if they say no to an add-on they are more likely to complete their policy purchase.
The simple act of pausing to interact reduces abandonment. Crucially, customers don’t find Selma intrusive, because her interventions are contextual, relevant, and helpful.
What about compliance?
Insurance is a regulated industry. That means AI can’t just be persuasive – it has to be safe and compliant.
Ron explained OpenDialog’s answer: the SAFER benchmark. This framework ensures Selma behaves consistently, safely, and appropriately across five dimensions:
- Security
- Context Understanding
- Information Fidelity
- Response Evaluation
- Refusal (knowing when not to answer)
This balance of sales support and compliance is what makes AI agents genuinely viable for insurance.
So, hype or reality?
Danny and Ron’s conclusion was clear: it’s reality.
AI agents like Selma are already proving their impact – increasing conversions, lifting add-on revenue, and generating invaluable insight into customer behaviour.
For insurers, that means a huge opportunity: turning abandoned quotes into live policies, and doing it in a compliant, customer-friendly way.
