First Robot–Run Insurance Agency Opens for Business
Goodbye agency principals, producers and customer service reps, hello Roberto Siber, CPCU.
Siber is the buff, blue-eyed and bald principal of the Buyonic Insurance Agency in Austin, Texas.
This insurance android is more evidence that the future of mechanized businesses has arrived, with robots marching out of computer backrooms and off assembly lines right onto the frontlines of the service economy.
Recent studies have suggested that a quarter of insurance jobs could be replaced by robots over the next decade.
Buyonic is not one of the virtual or online agencies vying for business on the cloud today. Rather, it’s an old-fashioned, Main Street brick-and-mortar retail shop where customers actually show up in person. Except now when customers show up at Buyonic, they are greeted not by a human but by Siber. They have entered the country’s (and maybe the world’s) first robot-run customer-facing financial services business.
Buyonic is modeled after a robot-run McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix and a hotel in Japan where the entire staff is comprised of robots.
