2026 Executive Outlook | Philomena Comerford, Baird MacGregor Insurance Brokers LP, Hargraft Schofield LP

An intense escalation of AI’s deployment across the insurance industry is expected in 2026.

The hope among brokers is that AI will be used to perform routine tasks more efficiently, freeing them up to do more meaningful work, and to improve customer service and advocacy standards.

In an ideal world, AI will allow brokers to do more for their clients. AI can perform predictable, analytical, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. while also integrating more personalized client interactions into the customer experience.  

However, some brokerages might feel pressured to use AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool —particularly when equity partners push for increased profits during a stubbornly competitive market cycle.

Under these circumstances, sadly, entry-level jobs will be most vulnerable to cuts. If that happens, an important cohort of understudies — who in the past learned critical thinking and gained fundamental knowledge from industry veterans — could be eliminated.  

Regardless of the rationale for AI’s integration into the brokerage’s business model, there will be concerns about who is responsible for the efficacy of AI solutions brokers embed in their operations. This will pose regulatory compliance challenges. along with evolving professional, privacy and cyber liability exposures that could arise from erroneous design, negligent oversight, or the use of customer data without consent. Poorly conceived algorithms run the risk of delivering flawed, biased, or unfair outcomes.

Drawing upon fenced, homogenous data to perform defined AI functions is a safer bet than relying on aggregated external data from unknown sources. Contracts with third-party AI partners will need to be carefully crafted, bearing in mind regulators will hold the broker accountable for outcomes.

The broker must supervise the accuracy of the machine’s learning and its performance within well-defined parameters. Any systemic abdication to the machine undermines a broker’s customer mandate.

A few years ago, our client who had been insured with the same insurer for more than 25 years received a non-renewal notice. We later learned the notice was due to a loss ratio algorithm that picked up a fire from five years prior — the client’s one and only claim over a quarter of a century.

Due to our intervention and questioning of this algorithmic logic, the non-renewal notice was rescinded.  Our clients still want us to think and act like this, so they don’t feel like they are caught in the matrix.