The annual problem
The Annual Enrollment Period compresses a year of Medicare demand into roughly seven weeks. The traditional answer is seasonal hiring: recruit in late summer, train on TPMO rules in weeks, staff up for October, and let most of it go in December. Every step of that cycle is expensive, and the compliance risk peaks exactly when the floor is greenest.
Surge capacity as configuration
AI fronting changes the shape of the problem: capacity becomes a setting, not a hiring funnel. More concurrent agents during AEP, fewer in the off-season — same script discipline on call one and call fifty thousand, because the disclaimer is structural and QA hears everything. Your licensed agents — the scarce, regulated resource — stay focused on plan conversations and enrollment, fed by warm transfers instead of by a temp fronter lottery.
What to do before September
Pilot in the off-season, not during the surge. Prove the SIP bridge on your dialer, validate the TPMO flow with your compliance team against the current CMS guidance, and benchmark transfer quality against your best human fronters. Then AEP becomes a turn of the concurrency dial instead of a staffing sprint.