What is Agentic Process Outsourcing?
Agentic Process Outsourcing is outsourcing where the work is performed by governed AI agents rather than by people.
The scope is the one you already contract for: policy servicing, submissions, issuance, billing and collections, renewals, claims intake and administration. The service levels and the accountability are familiar too. What changes is who performs the work, how your cost behaves as volume grows, and what an auditor can reconstruct afterwards.
You are handing over a defined body of work against a measured outcome. That is why the budget usually comes from operations rather than technology, and why the conversation belongs with the chief operating officer.
Why would a carrier or broker need it?
Because in a people-based operation, growth and operating cost move together.
Volume doubles and seats double. Renewals arrive in seasonal surges that outrun the desk. Your most experienced underwriters spend the week on standard cases, so the difficult risks queue behind the routine ones. Margin leaks at both ends of that queue: bad risk gets renewed because nobody had time to look properly, and good risk gets declined because a guideline fired and no one was free to override it.
The consequence reaches past the expense ratio. Cost of serve decides which business is possible at all. It is why SME propositions stall, why small ticket protection goes unwritten, and why entering a new market means rebuilding an operating model rather than extending one.
APO breaks the link between the volume of work and the number of people doing it. That is the whole point of the category.
What does Gangkhar actually change?
Three things, and the order matters.
Cost. APO is designed to reduce manual touches and make operating effort scale with completed work rather than linear headcount. The baseline, target and acceptance criteria are agreed for each programme, with controls built into the workflow rather than added around it.
Productivity. Work your operation could not previously reach. Time to market moves from months to days, roughly 90% faster, because products are configured rather than coded. Touchless rates above 90% are achievable on standard servicing. Brokers get answers in seconds rather than days, which is a distribution advantage before it is a service metric.
Performance. The part that compounds. Because Sherpa+Lens runs on the same platform as the agents, the economics improve while the book is live rather than at the next quarterly review: 30% or more uplift in conversion and attachment, sharper renewal terms, and next-product offers surfacing while a customer is already in a servicing conversation.
Reduce cost and you improve one year's expense ratio. Improve conversion, retention and attachment and you change the value of the book.
Why Gangkhar rather than another provider?
Our agents read your product, not a procedure document. Most agentic operations projects start from a written standard operating procedure. That document is a snapshot; your products are not. A limit moves, an exclusion is added, appetite tightens in one territory, and the agent carries on executing last quarter's product. Ours validate every action against your live product configuration, pricing logic and underwriting guidelines, so a rule change on Tuesday changes Wednesday's decisions with nothing rewritten.
We built the product layer first. Sherpa+ holds the product, the rules and the pricing. Sherpa+Mesh runs and governs the agents. Sherpa+Lens works on the economics of what those agents see. A provider without a product layer can automate your process. It cannot reason about your product.
We also connect operations to growth. The same governed product infrastructure that lowers your cost to serve can place protection inside real customer journeys and open new distribution. Most providers in this market address only one side of that equation.
We sit on top of what you already run. No core replacement, no migration, no change to your policy administration or billing system.
Frequently asked questions
What does APO stand for?
Agentic Process Outsourcing. Outsourced operational work performed by governed AI agents rather than human teams. Also written as agentic business process outsourcing, or agentic BPO.
How is APO different from traditional outsourcing?
Traditional outsourcing allocates people, so cost rises with volume. APO allocates governed agents, so cost tracks usage. Two further differences: we can reconstruct every action and the rule behind it, where a people-based provider works from sampled quality assurance, and because our agents run on a product and optimisation layer, the same programme can improve conversion and retention. Traditional outsourcing does not touch revenue.
How is it different from RPA?
Robotic process automation follows a script fixed at build time and breaks when the screens or the product change. APO agents validate against your live rules, so a product change changes their behaviour without a reconfiguration cycle.
Do we need to replace our policy administration system?
No. Sherpa+ sits on top of your systems of record and orchestrates the work around them.
What does it cost?
Pricing is set case by case, against the scope of work and what that work costs you today. There is no list price, because no two operations start from the same place. We put a number to it during scoping, once we have both looked at your baseline.
Will our underwriters lose control?
No. Underwriting and claims decisions stay with your people. Agents validate, assemble, check against your guidelines, route and execute, and escalate anything outside authority with the reasoning attached. Piece 4 of this guide covers governance in full.