The Fregeau brothers stopped selling automation as a toolkit and started doing one ugly insurance job end to end. The result is a useful lesson in vertical AI: depth beats a dazzling demo when the workflow is narrow, repetitive and expensive.
The company that skipped the insurance agent, hired a British-accented lizard, and turned '15 minutes' into one of the most repeated sentences in American advertising.
Allstate began as insurance by mail from a Sears catalog. Ninety-five years later, it is rebuilding the Good Hands around apps, driving data and a distribution network designed to meet customers wherever they shop.