ManyPets became the first specialist pet insurer to launch a plugin on ChatGPT. The move puts indicative prices from its Lifetime cover range directly inside the chat interface. Pet insurance is a contained product class, but it is part of a pattern that brokers across every line should be watching.
MoneySuperMarket launched the first financial services ChatGPT app in February, letting consumers compare car, home, and pet insurance without leaving the chat. Simply Business followed in April with the UK's first business insurance app on the platform. Small business owners could receive guide pricing for key commercial covers before being sent to its own website to complete a purchase. ManyPets has now done the same for pet insurance. Insurers and aggregators are using ChatGPT as a discovery and pricing channel that sits ahead of the traditional purchase journey.
The broker question is structural. When a consumer opens ChatGPT and describes what they need, they receive indicative prices from a named provider and click through to that provider's website. The broker has not appeared in that journey. The consumer arrives at a purchase decision having already formed expectations around price and product. For simple personal lines, that may not shift much in the near term. For more complex commercial risks, the question of where brokers maintain visibility in AI-native discovery environments is live and unresolved.
Each of these integrations operates on the same model. They surface indicative pricing and stop short of advice. They direct consumers to the insurer's own platform to complete a purchase, and carry a disclosure that the tool does not constitute a recommendation. That last requirement reflects the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Consumer Duty, which applies to digital distribution channels alongside traditional ones. The FCA is also reviewing how firms use AI in consumer services, with findings expected later in the year.
None of these ChatGPT tools, however, can bind cover or replace the advice a broker provides on a complex risk. The Simply Business integration is the one most directly relevant to brokers in commercial lines. It targets SME owners who are already price-led and digitally comfortable. It also positions ChatGPT as the starting point for an insurance search rather than a broker website or comparison platform.
Shane Larkin, chief marketing officer at ManyPets, said insurers are responding to a shift in how consumers search for and buy insurance. "This innovation is about meeting customers, and increasingly their AI agents, in the channels they use and trust most."
The volume of activity is modest but accelerating. Insurify, the US-based comparison platform, launched the first insurance app on ChatGPT globally in February. In the six months that followed, ChatGPT-referred traffic to Insurify grew 151%, according to the company. The share of new customers who said they discovered it through AI conversations rose from 0.15% to 5.7% in the same period.
Those figures come from a single aggregator in a limited number of US states and do not represent the wider industry. But they suggest consumer behaviour is moving in a direction these tools are designed to capture.
The more immediate question for brokers is visibility. If AI platforms surface indicative prices as the first response to an insurance query, brokers with no presence in those environments risk being bypassed at the point where consumer intent forms. That is not the same as being replaced. Advice, relationship management and complex risk placement remain firmly outside what any ChatGPT plugin currently does. But discovery is shifting, and the brokers who track that shift most closely will be better placed when it reaches the lines they write.
