An answering service for an insurance agency can take the call, collect the caller's details, book the appointment and pass it to a producer. It cannot quote, explain coverage or advise. Those need a license. Beside answers in your voice, captures the intake, and hands the rest to you.
We answer calls for small businesses all day. Insurance agencies are the one trade where the rules about what a receptionist may say out loud are published, in writing, by the people who issue your license.
What an insurance agency is allowed to let an unlicensed voice do
Start with the regulator. The NAIC's definition of the licensed role is one sentence: an insurance producer is an individual who sells, solicits, or negotiates insurance. (Source: NAIC)
Pennsylvania's insurance department publishes the line as two columns: activities that need a producer license, and what clerical and customer-service staff may do without one. The second column reads like a job description for a receptionist: receive requests for coverage for transmittal to a licensed producer, schedule appointments for and with producers, record a caller's information to give to a producer for his response, take factual information relative to a claim. (Source: Pennsylvania Insurance Department)
| A licensed producer has to do this | An unlicensed voice can do this |
|---|---|
| Describe or explain a specific coverage | Take the request and pass it to a producer |
| Give rate information that isn't a standard published rate | Record the caller's name, address and details for the producer |
| Counsel on which coverage to buy | Book time with a producer |
| Answer a request for advice on policy provisions | Take the factual information on a claim |
The department's own worked example is the sentence to keep: if an insured or prospective insured requests advice in any communication with an unlicensed employee, the response must be made by a licensed producer. That is the design brief for any voice you put on an agency line. A human answering service sits under the same rule, because the constraint is the activity and not the technology.
So can an AI answering service quote insurance?
No, and a vendor promising it is selling you the licensed column.
Beside markets quote generation, so this needs saying plainly. Every quote example Beside publishes is a service price quote, and the worked example on our own homepage is $525 of window tint on a Lexus. It is not an insurance rate, and nothing on any Beside page says Beside can rate or quote insurance. No configuration changes that.
What an AI can do on an insurance line is the other column. It answers, collects what you told it to collect, and gets the caller to a producer who quotes. That division is the arrangement the regulator already describes.
What you put in front of it decides whether that holds.
What to tell it to collect, and what to tell it to refuse
The safest intake set is one an agency already wrote. Tim Curts, who co-owns a TWFG agency in Ventura, configured his to ask four things: the name on the property title or loan, date of birth, property address, and the type of product needed, whether that is homeowner, landlord, investment property, renter or condo. (Source: Beside customer story)
Every item on that list is a fact about the caller. Not one is an opinion about coverage. That is the whole reason it is safe, and it is the test to run on any question you add: does answering it require knowing anything about policies, or only about the person calling?
Then the refusal, which is the part worth writing out. Beside lets you set the custom questions it asks and the exact words it opens and closes with, so put the boundary in the closing line itself: I can't quote or tell you what a policy covers. A licensed producer will call you back with that. Let me take your details so they have everything. Set once, it says the same thing on every call.
What happens on the call that comes in at 8pm
Walk one through. You set the ring count so your own phone gets a chance first, nobody picks up, and the AI does. It works the four questions, and it does not pretend the office is open: at Tim's agency the AI tells after-hours callers the team will call back the next business day, and during the day it promises a callback within the hour, which the team then delivers.
The call ends and Beside produces a summary with the caller's name, phone, email and the context. Tim forwards that summary straight to a producer in Microsoft Teams, and the client gets a call back with a quote within minutes. (Source: Beside customer story)
Nobody there calls it a compliance step. It is just the fast way to run an agency, and it sits exactly inside the permitted column.
What it costs, and what one account has to be worth to cover it
Beside is $16.67 per user per month billed yearly, which is $199.99 per user for the year, or $29.99 month to month. Each user includes one line, and extra lines are $4.99 a month.
Set that against what an account is worth. The latest official NAIC figures, from 2021, put the average home policy at $1,411 and auto at $1,062, and that is your client's premium, not your revenue. Your commission is a slice of each, and the slice comes back every year the household stays. By our math, one retained account paying you more than $200 a year covers a full year of Beside for one user, and every renewal after that is clear.
| A legacy answering service | Your own line, answered by Beside | |
|---|---|---|
| Who the caller reaches | An operator reading your script | Your line, in your voice |
| What it may say about coverage | Nothing, the same licensing line applies | Nothing, the same licensing line applies |
| What you get back | A message | Transcript, summary, contact, daily recap |
| Billing shape | Per minute or per call | $16.67 per user per month, billed yearly |
The billing shape is the part agencies feel later. A service that bills by the minute taxes you for the month your book grows.
What Beside does not do for an insurance agency
There is no agency management system integration. No Applied Epic, no EZLynx, no HawkSoft, no AMS360, no Vertafore. Vendors writing for this market tend to advertise native AMS integrations. We do not have one, and pretending otherwise would cost you a morning of setup.
What exists instead is a shorter hop. Beside lists Microsoft Teams, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Follow Up Boss, Pipedrive and Zapier among its integrations, so there is somewhere to put the summary that a producer already watches. At Tim's agency that hop is a person: he forwards it. For a shop of one to five people, that is most of what an AMS hook would have bought you.
Calls are recorded and transcribed, which is the other thing to settle first. Beside records calls for reference, training and compliance with an automatic consent notice built in, and you can turn recording off for specific contacts. In a two-party-consent state the disclosure obligation is yours, not your vendor's, so check that the notice you are using satisfies your state.
Beside is not a licensed insurance producer, and no Beside page claims a compliance certification, an audit or a regulatory approval of any kind. Nobody can sell you a product that discharges your license.
So the sequence is short. Point the summaries at whichever of those the producers actually watch, write the callback promise into the closing line, and put one question to your own state department: which of our intake questions, if any, do they read as soliciting. That answer sets your script.
The agency that already runs it this way
Tim Curts co-owns a TWFG agency in Ventura and Los Angeles, with four to eight referrals a day and forty-plus referral partners. He named his AI receptionist Sam and taught it his business hours and his intake questions.
"I went from writing about 40,000 in new written premium to about 120,000 overnight, just by myself." — Tim Curts, Co-owner, TWFG Insurance Services
That is his agency's reported result, not a typical one, and the figure is new written premium, not commission. (Source: Beside customer story) What travels is not the number. It is the shape: the AI never quoted anything, and the producer never lost a call.
Other licensed professions hit the same wall, which is why the same licensing question a law firm faces reads familiar, and the referral mechanics look like agents who work referrals the same way. Pricing sits on the pricing page.
We are also building Beside Agentic, an AI operating system for running the business around those calls. It is opening soon.
Sources checked July 30, 2026: NAIC, Pennsylvania Insurance Department, III home, III auto, App Store, Beside customer story. Commission arithmetic is ours. Nothing here is legal or compliance advice; your state department governs your license. Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.