Welcome to the Max Revenue Letter. Recapping the news, trends, and top producer insights from the week. Today: 3 briefs, 3 podcasts, 1 article. LFG🔥

Every few weeks this year we've covered another headline about AI coming for your job, WithCoverage's "replace every traditional broker" grift, ChatGPT quoting plugins from Plymouth Rock and Liberty Mutual, McKinsey asking who actually owns the customer. Here's a new study that looks, at first glance, like the rebuttal to all of it.

The 2026 Agency Universe Study from Future One (Big "I" plus 16 major carrier partners) surveyed 1,376 independent agencies, and the topline numbers are strong. 75% of agencies reported revenue increases from 2024 to 2025, up from prior cycles. Staff sizes grew too, average headcount climbed from 8.2 to 9.9 employees, with 1 in 3 agencies adding staff over the past two years. Marketing budgets jumped 44%, from $14,300 to $20,600, real investment in growth, not retreat.

Our hot take: Maybe pump the brakes a bit. We suggest not to read this revenue growth as proof the channel is immune to what's coming. These are backward-looking numbers describing a forward-facing problem. Three in four agencies grew revenue in a hard market, where rate probably did most of the lifting. That same study acknowledges the market is now softening, which means the channel is heading into flattening premiums with a heavier cost structure already built in. Agencies that used the last two year's tailwind to build real efficiency and deepen client relationships will handle that transition fine. The ones that just rode the rate increase are about to find out the hard way what their growth was actually made of.

Morgan & Morgan, the self-proclaimed largest injury law firm in the country with offices in every state and over 1,100 lawyers, just announced it's spending $1 billion on AI and legal tech over the next decade, roughly 4% of its annual revenue. Morgan & Morgan has already sunk $300 million into its own system, MX2, which now has almost 5,000 monthly users inside the firm and extracts medical records, finds police reports, drafts demand letters, and preps for trial, largely on its own.

They're not keeping it in-house either, MX2 goes up for invite-only licensing to other personal injury law firms starting in 2027.

Is it any good, though? One Massachusetts defense lawyer described facing Morgan & Morgan's tech in court as scary good, “it pulled deep social media, employment, and property data on potential jurors in under an hour.”

Our hot take: Don’t panic. It's not just plaintiff attorneys going all in on this, defense is right there too, leaning on similar tools to scour records, vet jurors, and pressure-test arguments before they ever step into a courtroom. Worth noting, none of this guarantees a win, the jury in that Massachusetts case still came back at one-tenth of what Morgan's team asked for. And the tech isn't flawless either, Morgan & Morgan got sanctioned last year for citing eight nonexistent cases in a filing, something the firm's own chief transformation officer chalked up to moving too fast, too early. Bottom line, this is an arms race, and it's running on both sides of the courtroom.

Quick primer if you haven't seen this yet: Meta launched an AI agent called Muse on September 8, and it's not just another chatbot. It actually shops. Compares options, fills out forms, negotiates, and completes purchases on your behalf, then keeps working after you close the app. It hit 2.5 million downloads in 13 days, outpacing Anthropic's Claude and xAI's Grok over the same window, and briefly topped the Apple App Store.

If this feels familiar, it should. This is the second time this year an AI shopping tool has rattled our industry. Back on February 9, Insurify's ChatGPT-integrated quoting app triggered what insiders are now calling the industry's own "Black Monday," the five largest public brokers lost an average of 9% of market value in a single day, with WTW alone suffering its worst trading session since 2008.

This time, Allstate dropped 5.5% and Goosehead dropped 20% for the week after BofA named its model "most at-risk," calling Muse a tool with "the potential to put out to market business that has traditionally been gatekept by highly paid human agents." Progressive, by contrast, actually gained, probably due to it’s heavy interest in commercial auto.

Our hot take: Wall Street clearly doesn't understand the midmarket commercial space very well, Black Monday back in February proved that when the initial selloff hit the ABC shops who barely touch personal auto. That said, this time they seem to have redirected their sights a little better. Will Muse kill every personal lines agent? Almost certainly not. But it's yet another real-time proof point of what we've been warning about all along. Low stakes, low complexity, low trust, that's exactly the kind of business that gets eaten by tech. The advisory, high-trust, high-complexity side of this industry isn't going anywhere. The simple stuff never had much of a moat to begin with.

In this episode, Brandon Schuh breaks down the insurance industry's biggest insurance news including Marsh's big push for single parent captives for data centers and why SPC's are actually a big nothingburger.

In this episode Micah and Trey talk with million-dollar producer Jeramie Holt to learn how he ditched cold calling for good by building in-person summits that write almost $200K a year in new business, plus his exact playbook for outreach, venue, agenda, and the follow-up that turns "good food and great info" into won deals.

In this episode, Trey sits down with Abe Gibson of Burns & Wilcox, a finalist for Rising Star in Cyber Insurance, for a deep dive on all things cyber. Abe explains why pricing keeps dropping even as claims climb, and why this soft market is a huge opportunity for hungry producers.

Russell Luttrell, CPCU is a recovering underwriter turned producer and agency owner. He spent over a decade on the carrier side, and in this piece he pulls back the curtain on what really happens when your submission lands on an underwriter's desk. It’s both super informative and highly entertaining. Can’t recommend it enough.

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