"Researchers at Dakota State University, in partnership with regional insurance carrier Safety Insurance, devised an experimental chatbot called "Axlerod" to assist independent insurance agents. Whether that assistance was substantial is up for some debate. Based on testing described in a pre-print paper [PDF], "Introducing Axlerod: An LLM-based Chatbot for Assisting Independent Insurance Agents," the chatbot can help auto insurance agents save time with certain information retrieval tasks."
"The extent of that help and its value to insurance agents varies depending upon how much it's used and how much time is actually saved, underscoring the challenges businesses face when trying to implement AI systems. The DSU researchers say that business-facing chatbots make more sense than consumer-facing ones because insurance agents, with their domain experience, are better suited to interpret subtle policy language and to spot hallucinations. And they argue AI technology can be consequential."
Researchers at Dakota State University partnered with regional carrier Safety Insurance to build Axlerod, an LLM-based chatbot for independent insurance agents. Axlerod wraps Google Gemini 2.5 Pro with a system prompt and tools and connects to internal data via a middleware proxy called LiteLLM that translates API requests between OpenAI and Google formats and handles Vertex. Testing found average time savings of 2.42 seconds for search-oriented tasks such as finding policy numbers, AutoPay eligibility, covered vehicles, and billing plans. Benefits vary by usage and time saved, and business-facing chatbots rely on agents' domain expertise to spot hallucinations.
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