“Overdone,” Goldman Sachs calls the average 9% drop of insurance brokers’ stock last month. The selloff was attributed to news that technology firms Tuio and Insurify will offer a GenAI-powered insurance app on OpenAI for consumers to receive customized insurance quotes via natural language.
Executive Summary
SAS's Franklin Manchester offers a viewpoint on the impact of AI-powered insurance apps on platforms, opining that they are unlikely to displace carriers' existing digital channels, because they still rely on carrier APIs, websites and underwriting infrastructure, often sending consumers back to carriers to complete quotes and bind coverage.For insurers, the real impact is intensified competition and higher quote volume—not structural efficiency gains—reinforcing the need to continue investing in core digital capabilities, data quality and human expertise rather than divesting from them, he reports.
Game-changing? Revolutionary?
Hardly.
While some analysts and industry experts have likened this announcement to “day zero” for an industry notorious for antiquated processes and stodgy distribution, calmer minds call for caution.
When insurance quoting came online nearly 30 years ago, carriers and storefronts did not go away. In fact, online quoting often served as a referral source when customers wanted someone to handle their business locally.
