EYMA · September 15, 2026
A complete agency response to an AI agent quote request includes five elements: carrier name, quoted premium (monthly and annual), coverage limits and deductibles, quote expiration date, and bind instructions with a direct link or email address. Without all five, the AI agent cannot present a complete quote to its human principal or initiate the bind process — which means your quote gets dropped or the agent follows up with a call your staff has to field anyway. Structure your reply for the machine first; the human reading it afterward will thank you too.
Most of the documented guidance around AI agent intake focuses on what the agent sends to the agency: disclose identity, include a structured RFQ, confirm consent before report pulls. That framework — detailed in the EYMA intake standard — is the right starting point for AI developers and agencies learning what compliant requests look like. But it leaves a gap that every agency hits the moment the first agent request actually arrives: what do I send back?
The answer requires a mental shift. A human applicant reads your reply and calls you with questions. An AI agent reads your reply and either extracts the data it needs to complete the transaction or routes the quote to an incomplete-response queue where it waits — indefinitely — for a structured follow-up. You can write a friendly, detailed email that a licensed agent would find perfectly clear and still send back nothing a well-built AI can act on. The reply format is as much a part of the intake workflow as the structured intake address you published in the first place. See how agencies set up the intake side at EYMA's email-only intake guide.
Every agent quote response needs five structured fields: the carrier name, the quoted premium broken out by payment frequency, the specific coverage limits and deductibles the quote reflects, the date the quote expires, and the bind method — either a direct link to an e-sign application or a dedicated bind email address. Each field should appear on its own labeled line so the receiving agent can parse it without pattern-matching against flowing prose.
State the carrier name exactly as it appears on the declarations page — not a nickname, not an abbreviation. Carrier: Progressive Casualty Insurance Company. If you're quoting multiple carriers, repeat the full response block for each. Agents that present multiple options to their human principal need to store and label each carrier's data separately. A reply that says "we got quotes from a few companies" with premiums described in running text produces nothing an agent can parse — and nothing its principal can compare at a glance.
Include both the monthly and the six-month or annual total. Premium: $142/month | $852 for 6 months. The monthly figure is what the human principal evaluates; the term total is what the agent needs to anchor the comparison correctly. If the premium includes a payment fee, call it out on a separate line — agents that surface "hidden fees" complaints to their principals will flag a quote where installment fees appear only in the fine print of an attached PDF the agent may not parse.
State limits and deductibles in a consistent labeled format. For personal auto: Liability: 100/300/100 | Collision: $500 ded | Comprehensive: $250 ded | UM/UIM: 100/300. For commercial GL: Occurrence: $1M | Aggregate: $2M | Deductible: $0. The agent's principal told the agent what limits they wanted; the agent needs to verify the quote matches that request before presenting it. A quote response that buries coverage details in paragraph form forces the agent to skip verification and present unconfirmed coverage — not a position a well-built agent wants to be in, and not one the agency wants to enable.
Quote expires: 2026-09-22. Use ISO 8601 date format — not "good for 7 days," not "expires next Tuesday," not "call us before the rate changes." A relative date requires the agent to know when your reply was sent, calculate forward, and trust that calculation correctly. An absolute date requires nothing except a calendar comparison. The receiving agent may batch quote results and present them to its principal hours or days after you send them; the expiration date in your reply is the agent's signal for whether a given quote is still actionable when the human is ready to decide.
To bind: [link] or reply to this email with "BIND — [carrier name]" and the consumer's payment method. Make the bind path unambiguous. If binding requires an e-sign application, include the direct URL — not the homepage of your agency's website from which the applicant navigates to a form. If binding goes through a reply to the intake address, say so explicitly. An agent that cannot identify the bind path from your response cannot complete the transaction without a human-to-human touchpoint, which is exactly the friction the intake standard exists to remove.
An incomplete request should receive a structured reply listing exactly which fields are missing, referencing your published intake spec. An out-of-appetite risk should receive a clear decline with the reason stated and, if applicable, a referral direction. Both replies should arrive at the return address in the request within your standard quote turnaround window — the same discipline you apply to human applicants. Silence, or a delayed "let me look into this," teaches agents that your intake queue is unreliable and drives future requests elsewhere.
Incomplete requests are the most common response scenario agencies encounter when they first go live for agent intake. An agent built before the EYMA intake spec was published may not know your required fields for a given coverage type. Your reply handles this without a phone call: Missing fields for personal auto quote: vehicle year/make/model, garaging zip, requested limits. Please resend with complete RFQ per our intake spec at [your spec URL]. That's a machine-readable instruction the agent can act on immediately — resubmit with the missing data, or escalate to its human principal to provide it.
Out-of-appetite declines deserve the same structured treatment. If you don't write commercial auto for certain vehicle classes, or if your admitted carriers won't touch a risk with three at-fault losses in 36 months, say so clearly and promptly. Decline: risk outside current appetite. Reason: 3 at-fault incidents in 36 months exceeds carrier guidelines. Refer to surplus lines or CAARP. An agent that receives a clear decline with a referral direction can immediately route its principal to the next option. An agent that receives silence routes them nowhere — or worse, routes them to the agency's general line to ask what happened.
The reply chain that builds up through this exchange — the structured request, the quote or decline, the bind confirmation — is your compliance record for the intake transaction. It documents what the agent disclosed, what consent was confirmed, what your agency quoted, and what the consumer ultimately chose. EYMA — the place where legitimate licensed bots go to sell their humans' products — indexes agencies that have published intake specs because the spec signals that the agency has built the workflow to handle what comes back. The reply format is the other half of that signal. See a live example of a complete published intake spec at viarapidaservices.com/agents.html, and list your agency at eyma.ai/agent-intake.
No — structured, labeled plain text is more durable than any format-specific standard. An agent that can parse JSON can parse a labeled email. An agent that cannot yet parse JSON will still extract labeled fields from plain text. Structured plain text in the reply body is forward-compatible with more capable agents and backward-compatible with agents that are running today. The goal is consistency, not complexity.
The agencies that win the agent economy are not the ones that built the most sophisticated API integration first. They are the ones that made themselves reliably reachable and reliably responsive — a verified listing on eyma.ai, a published intake spec, an intake address that receives structured requests, and a reply workflow that sends structured quotes back. The transaction closes in the email thread. Everything else is overhead that agents route around when they find a simpler path to a licensed provider who knows how to reply.
See a live intake spec at viarapidaservices.com/agents.html — and query eyma.ai/registry.json for verified providers.