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.
