Can Insurance Communications Be Both Personal and Scalable?

Insurance is built on relationships, yet the way carriers communicate with customers has not always reflected that.

For decades, insurers have invested in technology to automate customer outreach, improve efficiency, and manage increasingly large volumes of communication. While these advancements have made it easier to reach more people, personalization has remained a challenge.

Traditional communication systems often rely on predefined customer segments, standardized messaging, and one-way outreach. A policyholder might receive a renewal reminder, benefits enrollment email, or claims update, but responding to that message can mean entering an entirely separate process.

For insurers managing millions of customer interactions, delivering personal experience at scale is no small task. Add the industry’s strict regulatory and compliance requirements, and the challenge becomes even more complex.

Today, artificial intelligence is creating an opportunity to rethink that approach.

But as carriers evaluate where to deploy AI, an important question remains: How can insurers make customer communications more personal and responsive without sacrificing the oversight and trust their businesses depend on?

That is the challenge our portfolio company, TruAgents, is solving.

From Automated Messages to Personalized Conversations

TruAgents is developing an AI communications platform designed for regulated enterprises, beginning with insurance and financial services.

Rather than relying on static templates or broad customer segments, TruAgents enables insurers to generate individualized communications across email, SMS, and voice.

The distinction lies in what happens after the initial message.

Traditional outreach tools are designed primarily to deliver information. TruAgents is designed to support an ongoing conversation, allowing customers to ask questions, receive relevant responses in real time, and continue interacting without starting over.

Its platform maintains conversation history across communication channels, enabling future interactions to reflect what has already been discussed and allowing customers to pick up the conversations where they left off.

Consider an employee reviewing their voluntary benefits options. Instead of receiving a generic enrollment reminder, they can receive information relevant to their circumstances and ask follow-up questions directly through the same conversation.

For carriers, that creates opportunities to improve engagement across several important insurance workflows, including benefits enrollment, policy renewals, claims communications, customer retention, and agent support.

The potential impact extends beyond operational efficiency. More relevant, timely communication can help customers better understand their coverage, make informed decisions, and engage with their insurers when it matters.

Building Compliance Into AI Insurance Communications

While personalized communication presents a significant opportunity, adopting generative AI in insurance introduces another challenge: ensuring that interactions meet the industry’s regulatory and operational standards.

For insurance carriers, the ability to generate a message is only part of the equation. They also need confidence that the information being communicated is accurate, appropriate, and compliant.

This is where TruAgents approach caught our attention.

The platform incorporates automated compliance guardrails that review customer communications against established legal, regulatory, and brand requirements before delivery.

Messages that do not meet those requirements can be revised, while communication records and audit trails provide visibility into customer interactions.

Rather than treating compliance as an additional consideration, TruAgents has made it a fundamental part of how its platform operates.

As insurers move from experimenting with AI tools toward broader enterprise adoption, we believe this distinction will become increasingly important.

The question is no longer simply whether AI can improve customer engagement. It is whether carriers can deploy those capabilities with the governance needed to operate confidently at scale.

Early Results: What Happens When Insurance Communications Become Conversations?

One of the clearest examples of TruAgentsʼ potential comes from its work with Colonial Life, an Unum Group company.

In a voluntary benefits enrollment program, Colonial Life deployed TruAgents to deliver personalized employee communications across email, SMS, and phone in more than 50 languages.

The platform maintained conversation histories and answered employee questions in real time while operating within established compliance requirements.

The results were significant.

Voluntary benefits enrollment penetration increased from 22% to 47% representing a 114% increase.

For an industry where customer engagement can directly influence enrollment, retention, and long-term relationships, this is an encouraging example of the value personalized communication can create.

The relationship has continued to develop. Following initial deployment, additional teams within Unum began exploring applications across other areas of business.

Unum subsequently became an investor in TruAgents, participating in the company’s $3.4 million Seed round led by ManchesterStory, alongside Plug and Play and Cultivation Capital.

For us, this progression is particularly meaningful. It illustrates how a solution initially introduced to address a specific operational challenge can create opportunities for broader adoption within an insurance enterprise.

Built by Founders Who Understand the Problem

Behind TruAgents is a founding team with experience navigating the complexities of customer engagement within regulated financial institutions.

Co-Founder and CEO Majd Maksad, a second-time founder, previously held leadership roles in digital customer engagement and analytics at Citi, where he experienced the limitations of traditional enterprise communications.

That experience helped shape the idea behind TruAgents: using emerging technology to make individualized customer communication possible at enterprise scale.

Majd is joined by Co-Founder and COO Korash Hernandez, whose background includes experience at Citi and Goldman Sachs, and Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Dima Markus, who brings extensive product development and engineering experience.

The team previously co-founded Status Money, a consumer FinTech company, bringing together experience in regulated financial services, data science, and product development.

Their backgrounds provide an understanding of both the opportunities emerging technologies create and the operational realities of implementing them within highly regulated environments.

Why ManchesterStory Invested in TruAgents

At ManchesterStory, we look for companies addressing meaningful challenges across the insurance value chain, particularly where technology can improve operational performance and create measurable value for carriers, brokers, and their customers.

Our investment in TruAgents reflects our belief that customer engagement represents an important opportunity for AI innovation in insurance.

The founding team’s experience in regulated financial services was one factor that stood out to us. Their understanding of enterprise customer communications has shaped a product designed around the needs of organizations where innovation and oversight must work together.

We were also drawn to the company’s emphasis on compliance.

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into insurance operations, carriers need more than technical capabilities. They need solutions that can operate within established governance requirements while delivering meaningful improvements to existing processes.

TruAgentsʼapproach addresses both considerations.

Finally, we see significant potential in the broader applications of personalized, two-way communication across the insurance lifecycle.

Customer engagement influences nearly every stage of the relationship between insurers and policyholders, from initial enrollment and servicing to claims and renewals.

Improving those interactions presents opportunities to strengthen customer relationships, increase operational efficiency, and support better business outcomes.

As Matt Kinley, Founding Partner at ManchesterStory, shared following the investment:

“The biggest barriers to AI in insurance isn’t capability, its trust. TruAgents built compliance review and a full audit trail into every message, which is why carriers are comfortable putting it in front of their customers and agents.”

We believe companies that combine meaningful AI capabilities with the governance required by regulated institutions will play an important role in shaping how the industry adopts emerging technology.

Looking Ahead: A More Connected Insurance Experience

The insurance industry has spent years improving how efficiently it can communicate with customers. The next opportunity may be improving the quality of those interactions.

For carriers, that means moving beyond measuring how many messages are delivered toward understanding whether those messages create meaningful engagement.

For customers, it means receiving relevant information, getting timely answers, and experiencing greater continuity across their interactions with insurers.

And for the broader insurance ecosystem, it creates opportunities to strengthen relationships while improving efficiency and supporting better business outcomes.

TruAgentsʼ approach reflects an important direction we see emerging across the industry: AI adoption increasingly depends on demonstrating practical value within the operational and regulatory requirements of insurance.

We are excited to partner with Majd, Korash, Dima, and the TruAgents team as they continue building technology designed to make insurance communications more personal, responsive, and trustworthy.

Learn more about TruAgents at www.truagents.com

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