Every previous wave of digital change in insurance has run into the same obstacle: trust. Consumers hesitated to move to digital channels, and they hesitated to share data in exchange for better pricing, largely because they didn't trust the systems asking for that trust. This time is different, according to Puneet Chattree (pictured), insurance industry lead at Accenture in Canada.
"What's been really surprising about this data is that adoption is already very clear, it tells us consumers see the use of AI agents as a critical part of their search," Chattree said.
Accenture's Talk to My AI Agent report found that 82% of insurance consumers are already generative AI users, and 72% expect AI to shape how they buy coverage within the next 12 months. Chattree said those figures would have seemed implausible during earlier phases of digital adoption in the industry.
"If we think back to the digital adoption era of selecting a product and then binding, we would have never gotten to those types of numbers," Chattree said.
Part of what's driving that shift, he said, is that AI has simply become deeply embedded in everyday life, but he pointed to something more specific as well: consumers appear to trust an AI agent to guide them through purchasing or selection decisions considerably more than they trusted earlier technologies aimed at the same goal. That distinction, he said, is worth pausing on, since it represents a genuine departure from the pattern the industry has grown used to over the past decade, where new tools were typically adopted slowly and only after significant consumer skepticism had been addressed.
The data on how people are actually using AI reinforces that shift, Chattree said. When asked what mattered most when instructing an AI agent, 43% of respondents pointed to budget and value, evidence that consumers are engaging with these tools around genuinely important financial decisions rather than treating them as a novelty or a passing curiosity.
A second finding surprised him even more than the adoption numbers themselves, Chattree said: consumers aren't only using AI to search and compare, they're also willing to act on its advice, a distinct and considerably higher bar than simply trying out a new tool.
"47% said that GenAI and the agents have helped them find better products than they would've found on their own," Chattree said. "That surprised me, because human intuition tells you a machine can't do it better than you can. And yet almost half of this population is telling you they were able to find things they wouldn't have found on their own."
That distinction matters, Chattree said, because it marks a second, harder-to-earn stage of trust beyond simple usage. Getting a consumer to run a search through an AI tool is one thing; getting nearly half of them to credit that tool with finding something better than they could have found themselves is a meaningfully higher bar, and one the industry hasn't previously cleared with a new technology this quickly. Most prior digital tools in insurance, he noted, were treated by consumers as a convenience layered on top of a decision they still felt they needed to make themselves, not as a source of guidance they were prepared to actually follow.
For insurers and brokers, Chattree said the implication goes beyond adjusting a marketing channel. The scale and speed of this shift, he said, means distribution strategy itself needs to be rethought rather than treated as an extension of existing digital or direct-to-consumer efforts layered on top of legacy systems.
"Most of the carriers we're working with are asking, isn't this similar to D2C?" Chattree said. "Many are starting to realize D2C could be a funnel, a connection point, but AI-native distribution really needs to be treated as a completely separate business model and entity in how it's managed."
That reframing, in his view, is the real story behind the adoption numbers. The industry isn't simply watching a new channel emerge alongside its existing ones. It's watching a level of consumer trust build faster than any previous technology shift managed to achieve, and that speed, more than the raw statistics themselves, is what Chattree said should be shaping how carriers and brokers respond over the next 12 to 18 months, rather than treating this as a slower, more familiar adoption curve they can wait out.
