How Icatu Seguros Cut Insurance Quotation Time by 85% with AI

Icatu Seguros distributes life insurance, pension, and capitalization products across Brazil through a network of independent brokers who sell for multiple insurers simultaneously. With over a thousand brokerage relationships to maintain, the speed and ease with which a broker can serve a client often determines which insurer gets the business. The company recognized early that digital responsiveness was a competitive lever, not just an operational convenience.

The friction point was stark: generating a quotation required a broker to be at a desktop, log into the Casa do Corretor platform, fill out lengthy forms with dozens of parameters, and wait several minutes for results. Brokers working in the field—during client meetings, over WhatsApp, in informal settings—simply could not serve clients in real time. Questions about product rules, coverage limits, or commissions could take hours or even half a day to resolve through Icatu’s support team, creating a structural disadvantage in a competitive market.

Icatu and its technology partner ED built A.V.I. (a generative AI assistant) on top of n8n, deploying it natively within WhatsApp. Brokers could type, speak a voice note, or photograph a client document, and AVI would interpret the input, authenticate the broker, call Icatu’s internal quotation APIs through n8n workflows, and return a formatted simulation in seconds—along with a downloadable PDF and an automatic save to Casa do Corretor. The workflow handled multiple intents: new leads routed to Zoho CRM-style flows, while property or product queries triggered quotation pipelines. OpenAI models powered transcription of audio and natural language parsing. Redis managed session state. Sub-workflows enabled modular expansion so new capabilities could be added without rebuilding the core.

The launch changed how brokers interact with Icatu at the point of sale. Quotation time fell from approximately five minutes to under 40 seconds—an 85 percent improvement—enabling brokers to quote live during client conversations. More than 1,000 brokers now use AVI daily as a core part of their workflow, and some have switched carriers specifically because AVI makes selling with Icatu easier. The commercial support team’s inquiry volume dropped as AVI resolved the most common questions instantly.

AVI has become a durable competitive differentiator for Icatu. The solution won second place in the Gartner Eye on Innovation Awards for Insurance 2025 (Americas category) and third place in the 2024 CNSeg Innovation Award, validating both the technical execution and the commercial impact. With n8n’s Agent framework and MCP tools now available, ED continues to simplify the architecture—what required ten nodes at launch now takes three—while Icatu explores expanding AVI into additional product lines and sales workflows where speed to lead is critical.