Accenture’s Michael Reilly imagines a world in which AI agents do the shopping for personal lines insurance — a world where price may no longer determine a customer’s decision about which carrier’s coverage to buy.
Executive Summary
Researchers presented different findings about the level of insurance customer trust in AI recently, with one suggesting they're warming up to the idea of using AI agents to shop and another finding the majority are still not using AI to research products and coverage. But when they do, change is likely to happen. Not only are AI users switching insurers, but Accenture's Michael Reilly believes that in the not-too-distant future, when AI agents do the shopping, they'll look at factors other than price, including claims reputation, service quality and ease-of-doing-business in making coverage recommendations.“The carriers that thrive will not necessarily be the cheapest. They will be the ones that make their real value—claims, service, ease, integrity—as easy for a machine to find and trust as it is for a person to admire,” wrote Reilly, who is managing director for insurance consulting and operations at Accenture, in a report titled, “When the Customer Sends a Bot to Shop.”
In Reilly’s view, that’s going to be happening sooner than most carriers think. In the report (and in the LinkedIn post where CM found it), Reilly referenced an Accenture “Consumer Pulse” survey of 25,590 consumers across 16 countries. The Pulse survey found that almost three-quarters of consumers “would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase on their behalf.”
