Brokers must ‘understand where human intervention is necessary’ in an AI-driven future, says Empathetic AI founder 

Australians expect an average ROI of 171 per cent from agentic AI, with 62 per cent of companies also expecting more than 100 per cent ROI, according to a recent survey from PagerDuty.

Ahead of her session at the Broker Innovation Summit 2025, Angela Shi, founder and CEO of Empathetic AI, outlined how brokers can leverage the transformative potential of agentic AI for their brokerage.

The PagerDuty survey reported that agentic AI is being adopted at a rapid pace, with 60 per cent of Australian respondents saying their organisation has already deployed the technology.

Agentic AI has the capabilities to act as a high-performing broker who is constantly learning and evolving, while offering clients 24/7 service.

The unique abilities of agentic AI already have approximately 44 per cent of survey respondents viewing AI agents as more impactful than generative AI.

“Agentic AI is different because it can operate semi-autonomously within a defined scope,” Shi told Broker Daily.

“Unlike co-pilots, which support individual tasks like drafting content or retrieving data, agents can follow a set of rules to complete multi-step workflows, trigger actions, and make conditional decisions.”

While agentic AI will alter their role, the emerging technology won’t eliminate the need for human brokers, according to Shi.

“This doesn’t eliminate the need for human review, it shifts the professional’s role to designing the task boundaries, monitoring the process, and validating the output,” Shi said.

The Empathetic AI founder urged brokers to begin partnering with agentic AI to remain indispensable in an AI-powered future.

“To get started, professionals should look at well-defined, rules-based workflows that consume a lot of time but don’t require judgment at every step,” she said.

“Those are ideal for testing agentic use cases under supervision.

“The key is shifting from task execution to system oversight and judgement.

“Financial professionals who can design use cases, evaluate outputs, and understand where human intervention is necessary will become increasingly valuable.

“You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to understand how the tools work, where they might fail, and how to interpret their outputs in context.

“That combination of domain expertise and applied critical thinking will be essential as AI becomes more embedded in financial workflows.”

To hear Angela Shi speak on the transformative power of agentic AI, come along to the Broker Innovation Summit.

Run in partnership with principal partner NextGen, the event will take place on Wednesday, 25 June 2025 at the Sydney Customer Insight Centre in Sydney. Click here to buy tickets.

To learn more about the summit, including the agenda and speakers, click here.