Why Frictionless Technology Is Becoming Critical for Insurance Carriers

1. What is driving the growing demand for frictionless technology across the insurance industry?

The pressure is coming from both sides of the transaction. On the agency side, our 2026 Applied Carrier-Agency Connection Report found that 90% of agents have reduced business with a carrier because the process was too difficult, while 98% still re-key data that already exists in their agency management system. That is a significant volume of business moving based on workflow, not product or price.

But the demand is equally strong from carriers themselves. Carriers are competing for the same quality risks in the same markets, and the process experience is increasingly a differentiator. Those that are embedded in the agent’s workflow see submission volumes increase because data flows to them automatically rather than requiring a separate submission. They also see loss ratios improve because they are attracting better-quality, better-packaged risks. Carriers that require manual, multi-step processes are not just losing business; they are often receiving lower-quality submissions from agents who treat them as a last resort.

As agent expectations continue to rise, the question for carriers is not whether to invest in frictionless connectivity, but how quickly they can get embedded before their competitors do.

2. Your Connectivity Report highlights growing frustration with friction in the submissions process. Where are carriers falling short?

Re-keying is still the biggest problem, with 74% of agents naming it as their number one workflow issue, followed by inconsistent underwriting questions at 42% and slow portals at 38%. But the way carriers should read those numbers is as a map of where they are leaking business.

When 43% of agents say they reduced business with at least one carrier in the previous month because the process broke down before a quote could even be delivered, that is not a technology problem — it is a revenue problem. Every incomplete submission is a risk the carrier never got to evaluate. For carriers with commercial lines appetite, the data is especially pointed: 70% of agents say they re-key information often or almost always in commercial lines, which is the segment where the submission complexity is highest and the underwriting relationship is most valuable.

 Carriers that remove friction from this process by digitizing their intake and embedding with agency management systems attract more risk and win more risk.

3. Why do insurance submissions remain a major source of friction for agencies and brokers?

The core problem is a data format mismatch. Agents have the information in their agency management system, but carriers are still requesting it through channels that require humans to extract and re-enter it. A lot of commercial submissions are still handled by email, and only 7% of commercial lines-heavy agencies use dedicated submission capture software. That means someone is manually taking information from an email or document, entering it into another system, and then often answering a different set of questions for each carrier.

From a carrier perspective, this creates a second problem: the data that arrives is inconsistent, incomplete, and often requires additional follow-up before underwriting can even begin. That slows the entire process and adds cost on both sides.

The solution is not to ask agents to change their behavior — it is to meet them where they already work. . Speed is a real issue here: 54% of agents say they lose commercial deals every month because they cannot reach the right markets quickly enough. Carriers embedded in that workflow have a significant first-mover advantage. Applied’s Cytora technology does exactly this — digitizing risk data from unstructured sources like emails and documents and converting it into structured submissions that flow directly into carrier underwriting workflows, eliminating the format mismatch at its source.

4. How can better digital connectivity improve the financial and operational efficiency of insurance businesses?

For carriers, the efficiency case is straightforward but often underestimated. Better connectivity means structured, clean data arriving in a format underwriters can act on immediately, without manual sorting, re-entry, or follow-up requests. That changes what underwriters spend their time on — less data handling, more risk evaluation.

It also improves the quality of what arrives. When carriers can ingest data from any source and connect their workflows with that of their brokers, underwriters spend less time chasing down missing data and more time assessing the risk on its merits..

More than half of agents say they lose commercial deals each month because they cannot reach the right markets quickly enough. Carriers that are embedded in the submission workflow, where agents can route business to them without a separate process step, capture more of that flow. And the research shows that a simple quoting process is the second most important factor in carrier selection, behind only the product itself. That means connectivity is not just an operational efficiency story; it is a market share story.

For the broader value chain, removing duplicate work at the agency end has a compounding effect. Every hour an agent is not re-keying data is an hour spent on client relationships, coverage review, or risk advisory — activities that generate better outcomes for everyone in the chain.

5. Are agencies increasingly willing to move business to carriers that offer better digital experiences?

Yes, and the data makes that hard to dismiss. Ninety percent of agents told us they have reduced business with a carrier because the process was too difficult. Seventy-six percent chose digital experience over commission when we asked which mattered more. For carriers, that is a significant finding. Agents are making placement decisions based on workflow, not just economics.

When we looked at what agents mean by a good digital experience, 86% pointed to easy quoting and submission and 75% to speed to bind and issue. These are areas where carriers have direct control and where investment in connectivity has a measurable return.

The competitive implication for carriers is real. Product, price, and service remain important, but when an agent has a choice of suitable carriers, the amount of friction in the process can determine where the business goes. A carrier that requires repeated data entry and multiple portal logins is not just creating inconvenience, it is handing placement share to carriers that have made the process easier. At scale, across thousands of agent relationships, that difference compounds quickly.

6. What role can AI and automation play in making insurance submissions faster and more efficient?

AI is most valuable in submissions where it can eliminate the data conversion problem. A significant portion of commercial submissions still arrive as emails or documents. AI can read those, identify the relevant risk details, and produce a structured data record the carrier can act on — without human re-entry at either end of the transaction.

For carriers, this has two distinct benefits. First, it accelerates time-to-underwriter: the risk arrives in a usable format faster, and underwriting capacity is spent on evaluation rather than data handling. Second, it improves data quality and consistency, which matters for both individual risk assessment and portfolio-level analytics.

Agents are ready for this shift — 87% of agencies say they are ready to embrace AI automation, with notably higher adoption intent in commercial lines. Carriers that deploy AI to handle submission intake and triage are positioning themselves to absorb higher submission volumes without proportional increases in underwriting headcount.

The broader opportunity for carriers is using AI not just to process what arrives, but to shape what gets submitted. Carriers that can provide real-time appetite signals embedded in agent workflows — so agents know before they submit whether a risk fits — will see better-matched submissions and fewer incomplete or out-of-appetite cases arriving for manual review. This is what Cytora, part of the Applied Systems portfolio, is built to do: using AI to digitize incoming risk data from any source, structure it against carrier appetite, and route it to the right underwriting queue automatically — so the first human to touch a submission is the underwriter evaluating the risk, not a technician reformatting the data.

7. What should insurers prioritize when modernizing their technology infrastructure and digital workflows?

Start with where business is being lost before it reaches underwriting. The research points clearly to re-keying, inconsistent underwriting questions, and slow portals as the top friction points. But for carriers, the more useful frame is around how much submission volume is being diverted to competitors because the process is harder than it needs to be.

The highest-leverage change is getting embedded in the systems agents already use. Seventy-nine percent of agents want commercial submission automation, and 61% want real-time connectivity with their agency management system. Carriers that can receive structured data directly from those systems, without requiring a separate portal login or data re-entry, position themselves as the path of least resistance for agents with suitable risks. Applied’s submissionless commercial insurance capability — powered by Cytora — is a live example of this: agents working in Applied Epic can send commercial risk data directly to participating carriers without a separate submission step, removing the manual handoff entirely.

Improving a carrier portal in isolation will only go so far if agents still have to leave their normal workflow to use it. The submission process needs to be evaluated end-to-end: where does data exist, where is it being re-entered, and where can those steps be removed? Carriers that take that whole-workflow view, rather than optimizing individual portal components, will make faster progress and see more measurable impact on submission volume and quality.

8. Looking ahead, how will digital connectivity reshape the relationship between insurers, brokers and their customers?

The carriers that win the next phase of this market will be those that are embedded in the agent’s workflow rather than sitting outside it. When a carrier receives structured risk data directly from an agency management system with no manual submission step required, they become the default route for suitable business. That is a structural position that is difficult for less-connected carriers to recover from once it is established.

For underwriters, the shift means more time on what they are actually hired to do, including assess risk, price it accurately, and build broker relationships. Less time on data handling means better decisions and faster turnaround, which feeds back into agent preference and submission volume.

Agents and brokers, meanwhile, can spend less time on administration and more time with clients, advising on coverage, identifying gaps, and managing renewals proactively. The customer may never see the technology, but they experience the outcome: a broker who can get to the right market faster and come back with a well-matched quote.

The longer-term shift is toward a market where the submission itself effectively disappears as a discrete task — where risk data flows from the client record through the agency system to the carrier in real time, with appetite matching and preliminary triage happening automatically. Carriers that are investing now in the connectivity and AI infrastructure to support that model will be best positioned when it becomes the norm. Submissionless commercial insurance — where a carrier receives a fully structured risk record from an agency’s existing system with no agent-facing submission step — is the clearest early signal of where this is heading. Applied is already delivering this in production, and the carriers participating are seeing what it means to receive business that arrives ready to underwrite.