In this Insurance Business TV report, independent UK brokers discuss where AI can help their businesses and where they remain cautious. From using it to ease administrative workloads to building a tool for specialist risks, the panel shares its experiences of adoption. They also consider the risks of relying too heavily on AI and the challenges when clients use it to question claims decisions.
00:01 - Bryony Garlick: 73% of UK insurers are already using generative AI in claims resolution. Among independent brokers, the picture is more cautious and more divided. For Russell Sessions, the instinct is to hold back.
00:14 - Russell Sessions: I don't think we've embraced it particularly well. I think we're quite comfortable carrying on doing what we do without too much reliance on AI. It scares me a little bit, I think, to be honest that we move into that world where there's too much of a heavy reliance on it.
00:35 - Bryony Garlick: Alan Tate-Smith sees it differently as a response to a problem the panel kept returning to recruitment.
00:42 - Alan Tate-Smith: If we're struggling to find people like that, AI has to become an option to look at in terms of getting the work done. whether AI is going to become a part of that administrative level of a transaction and then the experienced people do the customer facing stuff and the insurer negotiations. I think that increasingly may become an area that people have to look at.
01:08 - Bryony Garlick: Gareth Cotty's concern isn't whether brokers use AI, it's what happens when clients do.
01:13 - Gareth Cotty: What it is doing is making everyone an expert. That's the challenge because it's often wrong. If a claim is declined, then it's probably going straight into an AI agent that probably challenge the thinking. You have to be at your best all the time.
01:33 - Bryony Garlick: Duncan Spencer took a third route entirely, building his own tool rather than adopting one off the shelf.
01:39 - Duncan Spencer: So, we've actually built an AI tool that will mine that data for us. There's not a co-pilot. It's not ChatGPT. It's our own model. So, what it's done for us is reduced a day's worth of work into 20 minutes. But that's only working for unique risks. As soon as you try to do it in a in a turn the handle model, it's not there because the error rates are too high.
02:06 - Bryony Garlick: Caution, adaptation, and in-house investment. 40% of UK brokers now rank talent, not AI, as their single biggest concern. For this panel, at least, the bigger fear isn't the technology, it's who's left to use it.
