Hunted or Helpful? Why AI Is Changing Perception Faster Than Reality
This article is based on a column originally published in a Dutch professional insurance magazine that has been in circulation for over 89 years.
It happened quickly
On 9 February 2026, the S&P 500 Insurance Index dropped nearly four percent in a single day. Some of the large brokers took double-digit hits. Tens of billions in market value, gone before lunch.
No hurricane. No financial crisis. No regulatory bombshell. Just a couple of new apps that let consumers compare and buy insurance by talking to a chatbot. That was enough to spook the entire market.
I watched it happen from my desk with a mixture of fascination and mild exasperation. Not because I thought the panic was justified -- but because this exact movie has played before, and apparently we have all forgotten how it ended.
When perception moves faster than reality
Nothing about the underlying business had changed overnight. The same clients still had the same policies, the same claims were being processed, the same advisers were picking up the phone. But the market does not trade on what is happening today -- it trades on what it fears might happen tomorrow.
We have been telling ourselves this for years, and it is still true. But here is what made me pause: when a consumer can get a reasonably coherent insurance comparison through a chat interface in ninety seconds, the "advice is different" argument needs to be backed by something more than tradition. It needs to be backed by actually being different.
The fear of disintermediation returns
Disintermediation. There is a word that comes back every five years or so, like a slightly annoying relative at Christmas. The internet was supposed to kill brokers in 2000. Comparison sites were going to finish the job in 2010. Insurtechs had a go around 2018.
And yet, here we are. Brokers are still here, still growing, still relevant. So why does the same fear keep returning? Because each time, the technology gets a little closer to the parts of the job that actually matter. Not just quoting and binding -- but understanding, explaining, recommending. The gap between what technology can do and what an adviser does is still real. It is just narrower than it was.
Not all advice is the same
Let's be honest: if you are a broker whose main value proposition is filling in forms and forwarding quotes, then yes, you should probably be worried. That work is going to be automated, and frankly, it probably should be. Nobody went into this profession because they loved data entry.
But the broker who sits across the table from a business owner, who understands the nuance of their risk, who spots the gap in their coverage that would have been a disaster at exactly the wrong moment -- that person is not being replaced by a chatbot. Not this year, not next year, and probably not for a very long time.
Where value is really created
What is shifting is where the market assigns value. After three and a half years of working with brokers across four countries, the pattern is clear to me now. The firms that grow are not necessarily the biggest or the most digital. They are the ones that know their portfolio deeply enough to act before the client asks. Organic growth -- retention, cross-sell, deepening relationships -- is becoming the metric that separates the firms that thrive from the ones that get acquired.
I have watched brokers who adopted data-driven portfolio management grow their book by double digits while their competitors were still debating whether to upgrade their CRM. Technology does not destroy value. But it does make it painfully obvious who creates it and who does not.
Final thought
I know that sounds like a LinkedIn post, and I apologise. But after watching this cycle play out three times now -- each wave of panic, each recovery, each time the bar slightly higher -- I keep coming back to it because it is the most honest summary I can find. The intermediary is not disappearing. The intermediary who coasts on inertia, though -- that role has a shelf life, and it is getting shorter. I have seen enough portfolios from the inside now to say that with some confidence, not as a provocation, but as an observation.