Smart Choice®, a leading network of independent insurance agents, today announced that it has hired Nate Minton as vice president of AI strategy and innovation. His role is to lead how artificial intelligence is evaluated, built, and deployed.
Minton built his career in service operations. At Verizon he moved from frontline roles into people leadership and was selected for the company’s leadership development program, later serving in the Executive Relations Office for Verizon Business and Government. He then joined Rad Power Bikes as product support manager and went on to lead customer service operations for an organization of more than 150. At Concentrix, Minton worked as an NLU data analytics and optimization consultant, tuning small and large language models to rebuild customer experience platforms for Fortune 500 companies. That work included improving voicebot and chatbot performance with generative AI.
“Our goal with this role and highly qualified hire was to blaze an entirely new technology path that will further advance our leadership position as the fastest growing network,” said Andrew Caldwell, chief executive officer of Smart Choice. As well, we want to provide AI resources to our partnered agents so that they too can increase the efficiency and profitability of their agencies either with customized licensed software or bespoke solutions – which is right in Nate’s wheelhouse.”
According to Nate, “the AI conversation in insurance has been mostly noise. Vendors sell a platform, agents get homework. I would rather build infrastructure that sits underneath the workflows agents already use, so the maintenance and administrative work is accelerated, and they spend their time growing the book instead.”