On to the next level
AI already does many tasks better than humans, but this will lift quality, not cut jobs, experts insist
By Miranda Maxwell
Hundreds of insurance professionals heard how the latest technology is shaping the industry at a sold-out InsurtechLIVE26 at Sydney Harbour.
Simone Dossetor, chief executive at Insurtech Australia, says venture capital interest in insurtechs has surged, which makes a “nice change from the funding desert of before”.
Scaling ambition will be a key theme in coming years, she says – as will deploying AI confidently.
“We’re seeing positive momentum, there is a real interest in where the sector is at.”
Below are some of the views shared by industry leaders at the event:
Lorikeet co-founder Steve Hind
The benchmark insurers are competing against today is not word of mouth, it’s not television, advertising, it’s not search – it is ChatGPT.
AI can do a tonne of work humans do today as well or better than them … But I expect to see a significant increase in the quality that’s expected in the market. So we will need just as many sales reps, it’s just that their proposals will be 50% better.
That makes me actually feel optimistic that there’ll be plenty of work for humans to do, because what AI will do is sort of level us all up.
Hollard and Petsure Australia director Richard Enthoven
In the current regulatory landscape, could you start [Hollard Australia] again?
The very easy answer is no. The minimum fixed costs of compliance have really skyrocketed.
By making the regulatory setting so challenging, most people involved in home insurance have decided to exit – over the past five or six years you’ve had all the banks say this is too hard. All the auto clubs, bar one, say this is too hard.
That is not a good situation for the market … shareholders reaching the conclusion that the investment required, the scale required, the complexity that needed to be managed in personal insurance had become too difficult.
The pendulum may have swung too far. We have pushed very hard to protect individual cases, and what that effectively means is it’s harder for everybody.
We’re starting to see some backlash around affordability of the product, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend now is to wind that back. These things go in cycles.
Will Snell, OpenAI
A challenge we often see is leaders and enterprises saying, “Let’s just start with one team, or let’s start with a very small deployment [of AI].”
That has often been unsuccessful – you create “haves and have nots” in an organisation.
It creates a lot of suspicion, and you don’t get the AI advocacy and literacy that actually spreads like wildfire. Being able to bring everyone along for the ride – that’s one of the biggest challenges we see.
At a lot of companies, there’s scar tissue around having the right idea at the wrong time, from building something and not really knowing where the technology is going.
So having the insight of what the road map is and what the right tools are is really important.
Curium chief executive Tetiana George
It’s harder and harder for junior people without deep insurance expertise to bring value to anything right now. If they are tasked with some simple jobs … they will heavily rely on AI, but then they don’t necessarily have the expertise to quality-check it.
That’s one very big challenge for effectively the entire new generation of people entering the industry.
The composition of the workforce is shifting very much towards experience … and it’s massive, because you have fewer and fewer of those people, they’re retiring. I’m not sure I have seen anyone who’s solving it effectively.
Scott Gunther of IAG Firemark Ventures
As the CVC [corporate venture capital], we’re like the quarterback – the champion or advocate for the start-up inside the corporate. That model is pretty straightforward and starts to create a mutual commercial value.
The harder model to get right is the internal corporate engagement model. This is a tricky one … It’s that old sales methodology of money, authority and need.
If someone’s got a need or desire, it doesn’t mean that same person has the authority to approve it or endorse it. Then there’s someone [else] who has got the money to fund it and sponsor it. The ones that get the best engagement with corporate and get the most amount of success can nail both of them.
QBE Ventures global head of strategy and partnerships Lynn Thompson
You can have amazing financials … but the conversation you want to have when you’re approaching a corporate venture investor is largely centred around what their priorities are, and can you accelerate their priorities? It’s an entirely different way of approaching the market. Just know that, because you can avoid a lot of wasted time.
Zemble co-founder Aurora Voss
Insurance is officially cracking open … We can certainly learn from how other industries have consumed and used technology. I think that’s a very exciting evolution of our community.
Dylan Rodricks, co-founder of 2026 pitch winner InsurAI
We are moving beyond clunky dashboards and building a system where a single chat does the work of 20 clicks.
While enterprise giants are busy flooding the market with generic AI layers, we are focused on building lean, specialised tools that work alongside existing software and solve problems cost-effectively.
The insurance industry doesn’t need more features. It needs a way for us to stop that 70% of our day wasted on administrative restrictions. We have moved the entire policy life cycle into a unified chat interface.
It’s a conversational engine. You simply talk to it … It compares the policy, wordings and prepares the results in seconds. We have moved from manual screen hopping to a simple back and forth conversation.
We automate the repetitive 90% but get in the expert for the 10% that requires human judgment.
