Aon has published its Q2 2026 Global Insurance Market Insights report, finding that abundant capacity and strong competition continue to support favorable conditions for commercial insurance buyers across most major lines, even as insurers increasingly use AI and analytics to sharpen how they select and price risk.
The report, published August 6, found that rate reductions, broader coverage and improved terms remain widely available. But two forces are cutting across that otherwise soft market in ways brokers need to understand before their next renewal conversation: AI-driven underwriting differentiation, and geopolitical volatility concentrated in specific specialty lines.
According to Aon, insurers are increasingly using data, analytics and artificial intelligence to support underwriting decisions and assess risk quality. While capacity and competition remain the primary drivers of overall market conditions, AI is enabling insurers to select risk more granularly, and high-quality risk information is becoming more important as insurers use analytics to make targeted underwriting and capital deployment decisions.
That's a direct, practical signal rather than a background technology trend. In a market where capacity is abundant, the clients who benefit most from that abundance will increasingly be the ones who can present well-structured, granular risk data, not simply the ones asking for the best price. A submission built on thin or generic risk information is likely to get a worse outcome than a comparable risk presented with detailed loss history, risk management documentation and exposure data, even within the same class of business and the same soft market. Brokers who invest time helping clients strengthen the depth and quality of their submissions are positioned to capture outcomes a standard submission won't, and that gap is likely to widen as insurers lean further into AI-supported underwriting.
The report identifies the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as driving heightened underwriting scrutiny across marine, aviation, terrorism, political violence, energy and trade-related risks, with insurers placing greater emphasis on policy terms, conditions and exposure management specifically.
"The Middle East conflict is driving a differentiated response across the insurance market," said Christian Hoffman (pictured), CEO of global commercial risk solutions at Aon. "The most pronounced impacts are in Marine Hull & War, Marine P&I, Aviation, and Terrorism & Political Violence, where insurers are exercising greater underwriting discipline, repricing risk and placing increased emphasis on policy terms and conditions. Despite these pressures, capacity remains available across all lines for well-managed risks."
The report also points to broader business implications of that instability, including supply chain disruption, energy price volatility and heightened concerns around contingent business interruption exposures.
For brokers with clients carrying marine, aviation, energy or trade exposure touching the Middle East, this is not primarily a pricing conversation. War exclusions, political violence sub-limits and contingent business interruption wording are being tightened at the underwriting stage even while broader market pricing looks favorable, and a broker relying on renewal timing alone to review those terms risks discovering a gap only after a claim has already exposed it.
Beyond geopolitical developments, Aon's report identifies claims inflation as an ongoing concern across property, casualty and specialty lines. Rising labour, transportation and repair costs continue to affect the value of property claims, while liability claims remain affected by higher legal, medical and settlement costs.
Those pressures continue to weigh most heavily on commercial auto and US casualty specifically, which Aon names as the clear exceptions to otherwise favorable market conditions. That pattern is consistent with Marsh's own Global Insurance Market Index for the same quarter, published in late July, which recorded a broader 6% average decline in global commercial rates overall, the eighth consecutive quarterly fall, while casualty moved in the opposite direction, rising 2% globally and considerably more sharply in the US specifically, where Marsh attributed the increase to claims severity and litigation pressure.
For a broker running renewal conversations off a single "market's favorable" message, that divergence between the broader softening and the specific exceptions is what matters most. A blanket negotiating strategy applied evenly across a client's property, casualty and specialty lines risks under-pressing where leverage is strongest and overpromising where it has already disappeared on auto and US casualty specifically.
Taken together, Aon's report frames current market conditions as a genuine opportunity for organizations to strengthen their insurance programmes and optimize risk transfer strategies before conditions eventually tighten.
Aon doesn't put a firm timeline on when that window closes, and neither does Marsh's own data from the prior month. What both make clear is that the opportunity isn't evenly distributed: brokers positioned to capture the most value for clients over the coming renewal cycle will be those pricing commercial auto, US casualty and geopolitically exposed specialty lines on their own terms, submitting stronger, more detailed risk data to take advantage of AI-driven underwriting differentiation, and treating the broader property softening as a genuine but narrowing opportunity rather than a permanent condition.
