Case Study: Progressive Corporation gains an AI-powered Flo Chatbot to boost mobile customer engagement with Microsoft Azure

Insurance shoppers gain new service channel with artificial intelligence chatbot

Progressive Insurance turned to conversational messaging to meet customers where they spend time—mobile and social apps—and to offer quick answers and auto‑insurance quotes in the voice of its iconic spokesperson, Flo. The challenge was to deliver a personable, witty experience that could scale, be updated rapidly without heavy data‑science resources, and hand off to a human agent when needed.

Progressive built the Flo Chatbot on Facebook Messenger using Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services (including QnA Maker and Language Understanding), which provided a fast, decoupled framework, easy model updates and built‑in scalability. The bot went live quickly, received steady organic engagement (with frequent model updates—about 75 in the first four months), improved customer interactions, and positioned Progressive to expand the bot to more channels and features.

Progressive Corporation

Matt White

Marketing Manager, Personal Lines Acquisition Experience