- Session
- Real AI automation starts in the email, not the AMS
- Stage
- ITC Agents, Workflows and Optimization Stage, Mandalay Bay Ballroom G, ITC Vegas 2026, Las Vegas
- When
- Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 1:55 p.m.
- Speaker
- Toby Hung, Co-Founder and COO, Bind AI
Key takeaways
- Toby Hung of Bind AI argued that agencies should start AI automation in the email inbox, not in the agency management system.
- He called the AMS critical for records, but compared it to a filing cabinet: the place you store work, not the place you do it.
- He named three reasons the AMS falls short for automation: it is not kept fully up to date, data lands too late, and APIs are hard to keep reliable.
- Quote requests, endorsements, certificate requests, carrier quotes and bind confirmations all arrive by email first.
Is the AMS the right place to start with AI?
Hung, co-founder and chief operating officer of Bind AI, opened by asking the room a simple question. Who can say that every record, every account and every attachment in their AMS is up to date? It was a quiet moment.
He was careful not to pick a fight with any AMS. The AMS is critical, he said. It is where an agency keeps everything about its clients. But he compared it to the filing cabinet in a physical office. You store paperwork there. You do not knock on the filing cabinet to get work done. The AMS, in his view, was built for record keeping, not for the work itself.
Why does the AMS fall short for automation?
Hung said Bind AI has worked with agency teams and brokers for about five years, and he sees the same three problems again and again.
It is not properly used
Account managers did not get into insurance to update the AMS all day. Documents go missing, and the latest version is not always there.
Data lands too late
By the time information reaches the AMS, the quote is often bound and the policy issued. The work you wanted to automate is already done.
APIs are not reliable
Even with an API license, he said, an agency principal should not have to keep those connections working with every other system.
Where should an agency start instead?
Move upstream, Hung said. Meet your team and your clients where they already are, and that is the email inbox. His slide listed what lands there every day: a quote request for a new commercial auto account, an endorsement to add a driver, a request for a certificate of insurance, a carrier quote back with subjectivities inside, and a client approval that says please bind.
“The real context isn’t in the AMS. It’s in the inbox.”
Bind AI slide, ITC Vegas 2026
An AI that reads those emails as they arrive can start the work at the moment it begins, instead of waiting for someone to key it into a system of record.
Why it matters for insurers and agencies
For agency owners, the message is practical. Start where the work shows up. The inbox holds the freshest version of almost every request, so it is the natural place for AI to pick up a task.
ZERO LEGACY, from Zero Legacy Press, adds two guardrails. Chapter V, page 148, warns that a tool which cannot write back into the broker’s AMS will be rejected, because the AMS stays the system of record for commissions, renewals and client data. Bidirectional AMS integration, the book says, “is the price of adoption.” And Chapter II, page 48, “Validate the Input, Not Just the Output,” says anything pulled from an unstructured submission must pass checks before it is used, with low-confidence reads sent to a person. Start in the inbox, check what you read, and write it back to the record.