AI Underwriting Targets the Trucking Gap Carriers Avoid

Commercial auto is still a line most carriers would rather shrink than grow. AM Best put the 2024 underwriting loss at $4.9 billion, the fourteenth straight year in the red, with a combined ratio of 107.2. Capacity has pulled back. Rates have not. That is the market Corgi Insurance, an AI-native carrier, is trying to enter with a dedicated trucking program under Daniel Hausman, named vice president in September. The appointment is not the story. The bet is whether continuous monitoring and a different cut of the book can work in a class that has punished generic underwriting for more than a decade.

Not one segment, the gap between two

In a written reply to The Supply Chainer, Corgi said it will not open by chasing a single trucking niche. The company looks for small pockets across preferred and lightly distressed accounts, small operators and large fleets. The pocket it called especially appealing is the space between fleet and non-fleet business, “since nearly every other carrier struggles to be successful there.”

That gap is operational, not marketing. Fleet accounts come with safety programs, telematics, and a risk manager. Owner-operators come with thin files, volatile mileage, and certificates that go stale. Most programs are built for one side and fail on the other. Hausman’s résumé is built on that split: non-fleet buildout at Nirvana from zero to about $30 million, a ground-up book at CSMV Underwriters to nearly $20 million in a year, and later work on capacity and distribution at Transportation Insurance Experts. The company did not name Hausman as the speaker in its response. The comments were provided by Corgi.

AI that watches the book after the bind

On underwriting and claims, Corgi described three uses of AI: constant review of the existing book, faster triage so underwriters spend time on context rather than assembly, and models fed by more data sources that improve as each recommendation is accepted or rejected. The firm said that mix is meant to work for fleets and owner-operators alike.

The claims half of the question was thinner. The written answer stayed on underwriting speed and monitoring. That matters in a line where the loss often arrives after the policy is already on the books.

The verification problem is already visible on the shipper side. In earlier Supply Chainer coverage of carrier insurance checks, Tristan Scaife, Director of Commercial at Business Choice Direct, said real-time confirmation that a courier still holds valid cover is what risk teams have lacked. BCD’s own data put monthly policy cancellations near 30 percent. A binder that is current at onboarding is not current at pickup. Continuous underwriting is Corgi’s version of the same pressure, applied inside the carrier instead of at the dock.

Rates still climb while freight tries to recover

The pricing backdrop is not softening with the freight cycle. On Bloomberg’s Talking Transports, Andrew Ladebauche, co-founder and CEO of Reliance Partners, a transportation insurance broker, said premiums could see another year of double-digit growth in 2026, driven by litigation and fraud and by fewer companies willing to write trucking. That is the opposite of a soft market. It is a market with fewer sellers and worse severity.

Corgi’s pitch is that AI lets it stay in accounts others will not touch without waiting for a human audit cycle. Operators should treat that as a claim, not a result. The line has already seen telematics-for-coverage programs that grew fast and then produced heavy losses when insureds stopped paying and kept rolling. Speed without a cancellation and audit trail recreates that failure.

Hausman’s job is to prove the book can sit in the fleet and non-fleet gap without inheriting both sets of losses. Until loss ratios, not bind speed, show up in public numbers, Corgi is another AI carrier entering a class AM Best still calls stuck in reverse.