The best way to understand what Attune does is to walk through a session in the pilot program from start to finish. This post does that with a representative scenario drawn from our early-access work in the fall of 2025. No client names, no agency names. The business type, the application data, and the process steps are real. The commercial outcome is what happens when a broker has a scored result in hand before the intake call ends.
The submission: a heating and plumbing contractor, central New Jersey
The broker was completing a renewal intake call with a small heating, ventilation, and plumbing contractor. The business had been operating for seven years, employed four field technicians, and reported gross revenue of approximately $580,000 for the prior year. Prior coverage included a BOP from a regional carrier and a separate commercial auto policy covering two service vans.
The prior carrier had non-renewed the BOP. The reason given was a change in appetite for contracting classes in the state, not anything specific to the client's claims history. The contractor had two small claims in the prior seven years, both under $8,000, both related to property damage during installation work. Nothing extraordinary. The broker's challenge was finding a replacement BOP with equivalent terms before the renewal date, while the client was still on the phone.
In the old workflow, the broker would have wrapped the call with a promise to follow up, spent the next two days putting together submissions to three or four carriers, and waited for responses. At least two of those submissions were likely to come back with no appetite for this class in this state. The broker knew that from experience, but had no reliable way to filter carriers before submitting.
What the broker entered into the Attune portal
The pilot program uses a structured intake form mapped to the standard BOP application fields. The broker entered the NCCI class code for plumbing and HVAC contractors, the seven-year operating history, the prior-year revenue, the claims history (two claims with approximate amounts and dates), and the state and zip code. The broker also noted the prior carrier non-renewal, flagged as "carrier appetite change, not client-specific."
Total entry time from opening the portal to submitting the application was under three minutes. The fields map directly to what any broker already collects in an intake call. There is no secondary research required to complete the submission.
What the scoring engine returned
The result came back in under eight minutes from submission. The output included a risk score, a risk label, an indicative annual premium range, and a carrier appetite summary. The risk score placed the contractor in a qualified tier for BOP coverage, with the two prior claims acknowledged and weighted consistent with their size and frequency relative to the class baseline.
The carrier appetite summary flagged three carriers with active appetite for this contractor class and revenue band in the state, and two carriers with partial appetite that warranted a closer look at their current guidelines before submission. Two carriers the broker had previously considered were flagged as having recently narrowed their appetite for HVAC contractors in the state, consistent with the prior carrier's decision. That saved two submissions that were unlikely to go anywhere.
The decision rationale block was the part the broker found most immediately useful. It listed the factors that drove the score in plain language: seven-year operating history (favorable), revenue consistent with four-person field crew (expected range, not anomalous), prior claims frequency (two claims in seven years, below average for the class), state and class combination (moderate difficulty, not excluded). The broker could read that summary back to the client directly if needed, which is exactly what happened.
How the broker used the result in the call
While the scoring engine was processing, the broker stayed on the call with the contractor. When the result came back, the broker was able to tell the client: they were a quotable risk, there were at least three carriers positioned to write the coverage, and the likely premium range for a comparable BOP was within a band that represented a modest increase over the prior policy. The reason for the increase was the current market difficulty for this class in the state, not anything specific to the client's history, which the broker could now say with confidence rather than speculation.
The client was not lost to follow-up. The broker and client made a decision together on the call about how to proceed, which carriers to prioritize, and what coverage structure to request. The broker submitted to the flagged carriers the same afternoon.
This is the operational difference that matters most. It is not primarily about automation. The broker still did the intake work, still made the judgment calls about which carriers to approach, and still managed the client relationship. What changed was the timing and the quality of information available at the decision point. Instead of two days of uncertainty, the broker had a structured read of the risk in the time it took to finish the intake call.
What early-access experience tells us about the pilot cases
The contracting scenario above is representative of a pattern we see repeatedly in the pilot program: a well-established small business, a non-renewal driven by carrier appetite rather than client risk profile, and a broker who knows the client is a good risk but needs a fast confirmation to preserve the relationship and the timing.
Not every pilot session goes as cleanly as this one. Some businesses present risk factors that require the scoring model to return a wider decision confidence interval, which means the broker needs to do more qualifying work before submitting. Some carrier appetite flags come back with limited options, particularly for niche trade classes in certain states. The tool does not manufacture solutions that do not exist in the market. It surfaces the real picture faster, including when the real picture is complicated.
What has held consistently across the early-access pilot is the intake-to-result time. The median result is under ten minutes. Some complex applications with multi-class operations or layered prior claims take longer because the model flags them for closer review. That review still happens much faster than waiting for a manual underwriter queue.
Where the pilot results are heading
We are refining the carrier appetite matching layer as we accumulate more pilot data. The appetite flags improve as we integrate more current guideline signals from carrier partners. The scoring model itself is well-calibrated for the classes we have been running through the pilot, though calibration on more specialized trade classes is ongoing work.
The broker workflow we are building around is not the enterprise agency with a dedicated commercial lines underwriting desk. That shop already has carrier relationships and fast turnaround. The broker we are building for is the independent producer at a four-person agency who handles a mix of personal and commercial lines, does not have a carrier representative on speed dial, and is competing for commercial clients on service quality rather than volume. That is the market where the ten-minute result changes the competitive math in a way that matters to the client and the broker simultaneously.
