Notch spent the week at BrokerTech Connect at the Fairmont in Chicago, alongside retail brokerages, wholesalers, PE-backed brokerage groups and carriers. The room skewed senior and technical: CIOs, CTOs, COOs, VPs of operations, and innovation and ventures leads from regional and national firms. Our CEO Rafael Broshi pitched Notch at the BrokerTech Innovation Challenge, and the team ran live demos of the Notch workspace from Booth 7, walking brokers and carriers through submission processing end to end. Three days of back-to-back conversations about where manual work piles up inside a brokerage. Here's what we heard.

Key takeaways

1. Document and submission intake is the number one bottleneck. SOVs, ACORDs, benefits enrollment files and submission prep came up in nearly every conversation. Brokers who have already tested extraction vendors reported accuracy around 40%. Most said 70 to 90% would change how they staff and operate.
2. Offshoring is the current fix, and nobody is happy with it. Multiple brokers described large BPO spend on enrollment and document intake as their single biggest operational line item, and several said outright they want that work back in-house.
3. Nobody is shopping for a point solution. The consistent ask was one platform that absorbs many workflows across service, submissions and back office. Teams are actively weighing three paths: an industry platform, a horizontal automation tool, or building it themselves.
4. The AMS is the bar for whether AI is real. Epic, Sagitta and custom Salesforce builds came up constantly. Work that ends in a summary isn't interesting. Creating the client record, pushing submissions into carrier portals and generating COIs inside the system of record is.
5. ROI scrutiny comes early and it's specific. Several brokers had run AI pilots that worked and still got cut on cost. Pricing, model selection and cost control came up in first conversations, not fifth.
6. Carriers are hitting the same problem from the other side. Carrier innovation teams pointed to broker submission intake as their live use case, with several targeting proofs of concept this quarter rather than open-ended exploration.