Insurance is one of those industries everyone depends on, but very few people describe as easy. Whether someone is trying to insure a car, a home, a small business, or a new policy, the process often turns into a long chain of forms, calls, missing documents, follow-up questions, and delayed replies. A customer may only want a quote, but behind that simple request there can be a lot of manual work.
That is the problem Jai Mansukhani is trying to solve with General Magic. As co-founder and president of the Toronto-based AI startup, Mansukhani is helping build a product that uses AI agents to handle insurance conversations over text. Instead of forcing customers to wait on phone calls or dig through long email threads, General Magic focuses on the channels people already use every day, including SMS, iMessage, and WhatsApp.
The company’s core promise is simple but powerful. It wants to help insurance teams move faster by turning natural customer conversations into completed insurance workflows. In early deployments, General Magic says its SMS-based agent helped reduce time-to-quote from roughly 30 minutes to under 3 minutes. For an industry where slow communication can cost brokers business and frustrate customers, that kind of time saving is hard to ignore.
Who is Jai Mansukhani
Jai Mansukhani is best known as the co-founder and president of General Magic, an AI company focused on insurance workflows. Alongside co-founder Anthony Azrak, he has been building around a clear idea: AI becomes more useful when it solves a painful business problem instead of simply showing off what a model can say.
That difference matters. Many companies are experimenting with AI chatbots, but General Magic is going after the less glamorous parts of insurance operations, where real work gets stuck. Quote requests need missing information. Claims need updates. Customers need reminders. Brokers need documents. Carriers need cleaner communication. These are not always exciting tasks, but they are exactly the kind of tasks that slow teams down every day.
Mansukhani’s work with General Magic shows a practical founder mindset. Rather than treating AI as a broad tool for every industry at once, the company has narrowed its focus to insurance, where the pain is specific, repeated, and expensive. That focus gives the product a clearer job to do.
What General Magic is building for the insurance industry
General Magic builds AI agents that help insurance companies and brokers communicate with customers through text. These agents are designed to support the messy middle of the insurance process, not just answer basic questions.
A customer might text about getting a quote. The agent can ask the right follow-up questions, collect missing details, request documents, and keep the conversation moving. If the customer forgets to reply, the agent can follow up. If the customer uploads information, the system can help structure it for the insurance team. The goal is to reduce the amount of repetitive work that usually lands on staff.
This is especially useful in insurance because the customer journey is often split across many systems. A broker may use a CRM, a broker management system, a quoting platform, a rating tool, email, phone calls, and document folders just to complete one request. General Magic wants to make the customer-facing part feel much simpler by letting people interact through plain language over text.
In that sense, the product is not only about speed. It is about lowering friction. Customers do not have to learn a new portal. Teams do not have to chase every reply manually. The agent becomes a bridge between the customer’s everyday communication habits and the insurer’s internal workflow.
Why insurance quote times are still so slow
Insurance quote delays usually do not happen because one person is doing a bad job. They happen because the process depends on a lot of back-and-forth.
A quote can require personal details, policy history, property information, vehicle data, business records, risk questions, supporting documents, and clarification from the customer. If one piece is missing, the whole process slows down. A broker may call the customer, leave a voicemail, send an email, wait for a reply, then follow up again later.
That kind of manual coordination adds up quickly. It also creates a poor customer experience. People are used to fast service in banking, shopping, food delivery, and travel. When insurance still feels like a slow phone-and-email process, customers notice.
For brokers and carriers, the delay can also affect revenue. A customer who waits too long for a quote may go somewhere else. A team buried in manual follow-ups may not have enough time to focus on higher-value advisory work. This is where Jai Mansukhani and General Magic see an opening for AI agents.
How General Magic cuts quote time from 30 minutes to under 3 minutes
The biggest claim around General Magic is its ability to cut quote time dramatically. The company has said that, in work with a major general insurer, its SMS-based agent reduced time-to-quote from around 30 minutes to under 3 minutes.
That kind of improvement comes from compressing the small steps that usually slow the process down. Instead of waiting for a staff member to manually ask every question, the agent can start the conversation. Instead of letting missing information sit unnoticed, the agent can ask for it. Instead of forcing customers into a call, it can keep the exchange going through text.
For example, a customer looking for a policy may need to provide a few missing details before a quote can be created. A human team member could handle that, but if hundreds or thousands of similar requests come in, the work becomes repetitive. General Magic’s agent can handle those repeated touchpoints while still keeping the customer experience conversational.
The result is not just a faster quote. It is a cleaner process. Customers get asked for what is needed. Insurance teams receive more complete information. Staff spend less time chasing basic details and more time handling the parts of the job that need judgment.
Why text messaging matters in General Magic’s approach
A major part of General Magic’s strategy is its focus on text-based communication. That choice is important because insurance customers are not always sitting at a desk waiting to fill out forms. They might be at work, in a car, at home, or dealing with a claim during a stressful moment.
Texting is familiar. It feels lighter than a phone call and faster than email. Customers can respond when they have a moment. They can send a photo, confirm a detail, or answer a short question without opening a portal or waiting on hold.
For insurance teams, this creates a more direct line to the customer. A broker does not need to manually send the same reminder three times. A carrier does not need to rely only on call queues. An AI text agent can keep the process moving in a way that feels natural to the customer.
This is where General Magic differs from older digital tools. Many insurance platforms ask customers to change their behavior. General Magic meets them where they already are.
The role of AI agents in Jai Mansukhani’s vision
The phrase AI agent can sound technical, but the idea behind General Magic is easy to understand. A normal chatbot usually answers questions. An AI agent helps complete a task.
That is the shift Jai Mansukhani is building around. In insurance, answering a question is only one part of the job. The bigger value comes from moving a workflow forward. Can the system collect the right information? Can it understand what the customer is trying to do? Can it trigger the next step? Can it reduce the manual burden on the team?
For General Magic, the customer message is not just a message. It is a starting point for action. A text about a quote, renewal, claim, or policy question can become structured data that helps the insurer respond faster.
This is why agentic AI is becoming interesting for legacy industries. Insurance does not need AI that only writes polished replies. It needs AI that can deal with real operational bottlenecks.
From OpenSesame to General Magic
Before becoming General Magic, the company was known as OpenSesame. The rebrand marked a clearer focus on insurance and on AI agents that help companies text with their customers.
That shift matters because startups often become stronger when they move from a broad idea to a sharper market. A general-purpose AI product can be hard to explain. A tool that helps insurance teams reduce quote time, cut manual follow-ups, and improve customer communication is much easier to understand.
The name General Magic also carries a sense of technology history. It points to a future-facing product while giving the company a memorable identity. More importantly, the rebrand gave Mansukhani and his team a clearer story: they are building text-first AI agents for one of the most communication-heavy industries in the world.
How General Magic helps brokers and carriers reduce manual work
Insurance teams spend a surprising amount of time on work that is important but repetitive. They answer similar questions, request the same documents, remind customers to respond, check whether information is missing, and move updates between systems.
General Magic is built to reduce that load. Its AI agents can support pre-quote, post-quote, renewal, servicing, and claims workflows. That does not mean every insurance task disappears. It means the routine coordination work can be handled faster.
For brokers, this can mean less time chasing customers and more time advising them. For carriers, it can mean fewer inbound calls and smoother customer service. For customers, it can mean a faster, simpler experience at the moment they need help.
This is also why the product has a clear business case. If an AI agent can reduce call volume, shorten quote times, and save hundreds of staff hours each month, the value is not abstract. It shows up in team productivity, response speed, and customer satisfaction.
Why investors are backing Jai Mansukhani and General Magic
General Magic has attracted attention because it sits at the intersection of two strong trends: AI agents and insurance modernization. The company announced a US$7.2 million seed round, bringing its total funding to US$8.4 million. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from a16z Speedrun and other investors connected to companies such as OpenAI and Figma.
Investor interest makes sense when the problem is viewed through a business lens. Insurance is huge, complex, and full of repetitive workflows. It also has a long history of legacy systems and slow customer communication. A startup that can make one painful process faster has room to grow into more parts of the insurance lifecycle.
For Jai Mansukhani, the opportunity is not just to build a better texting tool. It is to help insurance companies rethink how work gets done across quoting, servicing, renewals, and claims.
What makes General Magic different from a normal chatbot
It is easy to place every AI customer service tool into the chatbot category, but that misses what General Magic is trying to build.
A chatbot usually sits on a website and responds when someone asks a question. It may answer basic support topics, route a customer to a human, or provide general information. That can be useful, but it often stops short of completing the real task.
General Magic’s approach is more workflow-driven. Its agents are meant to carry a conversation forward, gather missing information, and help complete insurance-related actions. The focus is not only on what the AI says. The focus is on what the AI helps finish.
That distinction is important for SEO readers and business readers alike. In insurance, a nice answer is not enough if the quote still takes too long. The value comes when the system helps the customer move from request to response faster.
What Jai Mansukhani’s work says about the future of insurance technology
The work Jai Mansukhani is doing with General Magic points to a larger change in insurance technology. Customers are becoming less patient with slow service. Teams are under pressure to do more with less. Legacy systems are not disappearing overnight. AI has to fit into that reality.
That is why text-based AI agents are interesting. They do not ask the entire industry to rebuild from scratch. They create a simpler communication layer on top of complex operations. Customers can text. AI can structure the conversation. Insurance teams can act faster.
If General Magic continues to prove that its agents can reduce quote times and manual follow-ups, it could become part of a broader shift toward AI-assisted insurance operations. The future of insurance may not be one giant platform that replaces everything. It may be a set of focused AI agents that quietly remove the most frustrating parts of the process.
For Jai Mansukhani, that is the real achievement. He is not just building another AI startup. He is building around a clear business pain point, in an industry where faster communication can make a real difference for customers, brokers, and carriers.