Learners Case Study

Canal Insurance: A Mission-Critical, AI-Enabled Multi-Hub Platform for the Modern Insurer

Written by Mohamed Ghaleb, CFA | Dec 29, 2025 7:47:00 PM

Canal Insurance manages the full operational lifecycle of commercial trucking risks, including underwriting, onboarding, device provisioning, telematics activation, compliance, agent coordination, and customer support. As the business scaled, these processes increasingly required coordination across multiple systems, email threads, PDFs, and manual handoffs, making it difficult to maintain consistent execution and shared visibility.

Critical workflows such as loss run requests often required multiple back-and-forth handoffs across teams. Device onboarding and monitoring introduced additional operational complexity, with limited centralized insight into status, exceptions, or follow-ups. Leadership lacked a consolidated operational view of workload, throughput, and SLA risk across the organization.

Canal needed a unified operational platform that could standardize execution, reduce manual coordination, and provide real-time operational visibility, while preserving existing systems of record and governance controls.

Image: Before State Overview

The Solution

Canal implemented a multi-hub architecture spanning Sales Hub, Service Hub, Marketing Hub, Ops Hub, and Content Hub. The system unifies the policy lifecycle, device provisioning, telematics integration, agent communication, and support operations into a governed enterprise environment.

 

Image: Multi-Hub Architecture Diagram

 

Multi-Object Architecture for Policy Issuance, Customer Onboarding, Device Activation, and Broker and Customer Support

Custom objects represent fleets, policy submissions, devices, and agents. Ops Hub automations sync data from Guidewire, CustomerDB, telematics platforms, UPS tracking, and ImageRight, creating a unified operational data model / consolidated operational view.

Automated Policy Onboarding Pipelines 

Content Hub and Jotform intake flows feed structured Service Hub pipelines. Underwriting review, documentation, device allocation, shipping, activation, and escalation all follow system-driven steps with clear ownership.

 Full Device Provisioning Lifecycle 

UPS tracking and telematics signals automatically update device records. Exceptions, lost shipments, and failed activations follow SLA-backed workflows.

 

Image: Policy + Device Lifecycle Workflows

Integrated Agent and Customer Communication 

Marketing Hub delivers segmented onboarding updates, renewal notices, compliance reminders, and agent communications. RingCentral integrates into HubSpot for contextual call history.

Enterprise Governance 

Separate UAT, pre-production, and production environments ensure safe deployment and stable operations across regulated workflows.

Results

Key results included:

Image: Analytics + SLA Dashboards

These results are not limited to a single workflow. Gains are visible across onboarding, device provisioning, service execution, and compliance, with shared dashboards actively used by operations leaders to monitor throughput, identify bottlenecks, and manage SLA risk in real time.

Operational Improvements

  • Faster, more consistent communication with agents
  • Predictable device provisioning and activation timelines
  • Unified visibility across underwriting, onboarding, support, and telematics
  • Reduced operational friction and redundant communication

Applied AI


Canal leverages HubSpot’s native AI capabilities to reduce operational drag in high-volume workflows while maintaining clear human oversight and compliance controls. AI is applied selectively to augment intake, triage, and service execution, supporting staff with recommendations and prepared actions rather than automating insurance decisions.

 AI-Supported Intake & Loss Run Handling 

AI assists with the intake and structuring of inbound loss runs and supporting documents, helping convert unstructured requests into usable records within HubSpot. These AI-assisted triage workflows reduce manual handling and accelerate downstream processing, with underwriting and compliance teams retaining final review and control.

AI-Assisted Service & SLA Execution

Within Service Hub, AI supports agents by summarizing context and preparing draft responses for routine inquiries. These AI-supported recommendations are surfaced to staff and reviewed before sending, helping teams respond more quickly and consistently while supporting the SLA performance and operational visibility reflected in Canal’s reporting dashboards.

Data Quality & Governance

AI-powered data quality tools help identify duplicates and data issues across records, augmenting workflow execution and supporting clean, reliable operational data as multiple systems feed into a unified platform.

The Impact 

HubSpot became the operational backbone for Canal’s customer, policy, and device lifecycle. Every team now works from a connected system with fewer manual steps, consistent execution, and full lifecycle visibility. Leadership gained the ability to oversee onboarding throughput, device readiness, agent engagement, telematics exceptions, and SLA performance from a single environment.

These capabilities allow Canal to scale volume and complexity without increasing operational drag, giving teams confidence that growth can be supported by the platform rather than constrained by it.

Executive Reflection

 “HubSpot has fundamentally changed how we operate day to day. We now have a single platform that connects our teams, gives us real-time visibility into our workflows, and allows us to meet service expectations at scale.” 

— Laura Beth, Vice President