01 / Pricing Power
Pricing is under pressure
When work that took a team a week takes an AI system an hour, clients recalibrate what they will pay. Fee models built on headcount and effort lose their anchor.
We work with leaders in the insurance distribution and HR services sectors to determine what's at risk, what's worth protecting, and what to build next.
Large portions of what companies deliver can now be produced in minutes at close to zero marginal cost, and the capability improves every day. New entrants are building service firms around AI from the start, with cost structures that the incumbent model was never designed to match.
For PE-backed firms, timing sharpens the question even more. The value creation plan in motion today assumes a stable market for the underlying service: grow revenue, improve utilization, expand margin, exit on a multiple. Now, buyers at exit are distinguishing firms with a credible AI transformation story from firms without one, and pricing the difference.
BOI has been leading AI transformation for sector-defining companies, including Mastercard, UHG, Coca-Cola, J&J, Mars, DTCC, Nestlé, and Walmart. Asymmetry is the team we built for the services companies that AI disruption reaches first.
Insurance distribution and HR services: fee models tied to headcount and effort, workflows dominated by document and data work, and PE ownership that turns timing into a hard constraint.
We design and build the response with you: what your firm becomes, how the work gets redone, and how your organization makes the transition.
These are the sectors where the next two years will decide the next fifteen. Our work moves fast to enact change within months, not years.
BOI was incredibly knowledgeable, accessible, and collaborative — they immediately became an extension of our team.
Asymmetry works with mid-size services firms in insurance distribution and HR services, including brokerages, MGAs, staffing firms, RPOs, PEOs, and payroll providers, to redesign how their work gets done now that AI can do much of it. That covers the servicing workflows, the pricing built on top of them, and the roles of the people involved. Asymmetry builds it alongside your team, a few firms at a time.
First the work: AI takes on volume tasks like document intake and data entry, so your team spends its time on exceptions, judgment, and clients. Then the pricing, because rates set when the work was slow won't survive clients and competitors who know it's fast now. And then the people: roles shift toward client work, and orgs get rebuilt around it.
Pilots prove a task can be automated. Asymmetry helps you rebuild the firm around what that proves: if a renewal now takes an afternoon instead of three days, what do you charge for it, and which clients could do it themselves? Working those answers into pricing, roles, and workflow is what turns pilots into a different operating model rather than a faster version of today's.
It means redesigning the work before it means cutting anyone. AI absorbs the reading, rekeying, and routine processing, so account teams and recruiters get their time back for creating new value: advice, relationships, and hard cases.
Asymmetry is a venture from BOI, a 16-year old AI transformation studio that has led AI programs for global companies like Mastercard, UHG, Coca-Cola, J&J, Mars, DTCC, Nestlé, and Walmart. Mid-size services firms face the same problem those enterprises do, with smaller teams and less room for error, and that's who Asymmetry was built for.
Buyers now underwrite AI exposure the way they underwrite customer concentration: they ask how much of the platform's revenue depends on work AI can do, and they price the answer into the multiple.
Asymmetry works with services firms typically between $50M and $1B in revenue that run large delivery teams, whether they're sponsor-backed or independent. On the insurance side, that's retail brokerages, MGAs, and wholesale brokers, but not carriers or claims administration. In HR services, it's staffing, RPO, PEOs, and payroll and benefits administration.
AI now does the servicing that fills most brokerage headcount: submission intake, quoting, certificates of insurance, policy checking, renewal preparation. What happens next depends on how the account pays. On commission business, faster servicing doesn't typically cut revenue, so the savings land as margin until a leaner competitor out-services you for the same commission. Fee-based accounts skip that grace period: they benchmark at the next RFP, while carriers are now selling small commercial direct.
Done right, it reduces it. Policy checking and certificate review are where AI is already cutting E&O exposure, because comparing an issued policy against the binder, line by line with citations, is exactly what these systems do well. People stay on the exceptions. The riskier option is the status quo: a tired account manager eyeballing a 90-page policy at the fortieth renewal of the week.
No, but it's replacing much of what brokerage staff do all day. Winning accounts, structuring complex programs, and advocating in a hard claim stay human, because clients buy judgment and trust. The servicing underneath, submission intake, policy checking, certificates of insurance, automates fast. The dividing line runs between brokers who redesign servicing around AI and brokers running a manual back office against competitors who don't have one.
Yes, and much of it already works: candidate sourcing and screening, interview scheduling, payroll processing, benefits administration, routine compliance. The catch is that these tools are sold to your clients too, so work that was outsourced for capability reasons can move back in-house. What stays yours is the relationships, the compliance judgment, and the hard cases, and that's what the fee has to defend.
AI is replacing the work HR services companies sell faster than it's replacing the companies. Candidate sourcing and screening in staffing, payroll processing and benefits administration at PEOs and payroll providers: much of it automates, and clients can buy the same tools. What survives is the reason clients outsource at all: accountability for compliance, judgment on hard cases, a candidate or an employee handled well. Firms that rebuild delivery around AI keep charging for that. Firms that keep selling effort end up competing with their clients' own software.