Insurance News magazine June/July 2026

The ‘magic’ machines

All broker premium will be digitally transacted a decade from now, Hutch founder Robin Johnson predicts

By Miranda Maxwell

When Hutch Underwriting decided to create an artificial intelligence script to relieve two employees burdened with reading thousands of emails every day, it figured it was undertaking a major project.

“We thought it would take about three months to write the AI to address this, and it took one person one night,” founder and chief executive Robin Johnson tells Insurance News.

“We’ve implemented it into our workflow and now it identifies complaints 24/7, and it’s incredibly effective. It is extraordinary how easy it is to use.”

Mr Johnson headed Axa XL Australia before deciding to pivot to his current career path. He founded technology-driven underwriting agency Hutch in June 2020, just as covid was hitting. It’s a choice he describes as “brave or stubborn”.

“I kind of said to myself I would never work for someone again,” Mr Johnson says.

He started his career in technology in London in the dotcom boom, before transitioning to insurance – a family tradition, as his father was a Lloyd’s Name and his brother worked in the industry in the US.

“The tech industry was really not very sociable, most of the jobs became remote. I used to sit in the lobbies of massive insurers, waiting to go into an appointment, and wish I worked on the other side of those barriers, thinking, ‘I want to be in there.’ It was always destined.”

It was almost four years before he “earned a penny” from Hutch, which now has a team of about 50, including a dozen in claims.

“It has certainly been worthwhile. We have 30,000 clients, an awesome team, and we are growing extraordinarily quickly. It’s just a huge amount of fun.”

After working with optical character recognition technology to automate credit card application forms in the early 2000s, a move to AIG was a stark contrast.

“We still printed out every single file. We’re on Fenchurch Street in the City of London – some of the most expensive real estate in the world – and about a third of the floor was filing room.”

Mr Johnson notes that now “no one has filing rooms, paper files, is sending letters or faxes, and there’s actually fewer and fewer emails”.

He is certain the juggernaut of technological change won’t stop.

“It’s just absolutely inevitable that people will use AI to transform their processes. It isn’t going to be transformative, it is already transformative,” he says.

And because of the Ebix Sunrise Exchange – which was “visionary” when launched in the 1990s – Australia is “probably the most advanced country for digital placement in the world. No other country has anything like Sunrise.”

From the $34 billion of broker premium in Australia – per the latest National Insurance Brokers Association report – Hutch estimates $7 billion goes through Sunrise and the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, up from $3 billion a decade ago.

At least another $1 billion is processed via broker portals and platforms, he reckons – for example, Marsh’s Bluestream, Aon’s BIX, AUB’s BizCover and Envest Marketplace.

Mr Johnson believes that in the next few years, half of broker intermediated premium will be digitally transacted in Australia. The trend is “very clear”, he says.

“I think in another 10 years, the entire market will be going through platforms. It won’t matter whether you’re an SME or a major account, everything will be digitised and touchless, and it will be integrated, possibly in ways we can’t quite comprehend at the moment.”

But this won’t mean any “huge reduction” in head count. “Once you’ve got a digitised process, you’ve got more and more data, and you need people to mine that data and work out your next steps.”

With the arrival of spreadsheets, accountants went from being bookkeepers to valuable advisers, Mr Johnson says, whereas stocktakers who manually reconciled goods disappeared.

“The insurance industry is not going to be in that stocktaker camp. We’re going to be very much like the transformation that happened to accounting.

“We’re going to find that we are moving higher and higher up the value chain, as we are able to offer better advice because we have more data, better products, and price them more keenly – and probably more job satisfaction at the same time.”

The average premium at Hutch is just a few thousand dollars, and Mr Johnson says this model only works thanks to substantial investment in technology – a capital expenditure hurdle that deters competitors.

Eleven different systems have been integrated at the agency to create a “magic ecosystem” where underwriting is automated and AI summarises claims and proposes next steps – but AI-determined claims are not on the horizon “any time soon”.

“Certainly, we’re going to have a human in the claims process for the time being. It could have unforeseen consequences unless you have rigorous controls and tests. So we’ve got a really well formed risk management framework around AI.”

On May 20, Hutch launched Dawn, an AI service that binds via Sunrise, populates broker management systems and completes the entire quote process without manual data entry. Mr Johnson believes it is a global first, allowing a broker to transact without any keying.

“I cannot find anything else that’s similar anywhere in the world. I’m extremely proud of the team for launching this game-changer.

“We’ve been using AI extensively in the business for over 12 months, but this is the first externally visible use of it. The future has arrived … With zero effort, you can get a quote and bind it.

“We’re beginning to see the magic of AI impacting the industry. That is transformative, and it isn’t the future – it’s here, now. It’s a new dawn.”

With tools such as Claude Code, the cost of building systems has “absolutely plummeted”, allowing Hutch to target more innovation, Mr Johnson says.

“We’re able to do things that the mega-insurers can’t get to yet, because if you haven’t got a legacy tech stack, the cost of building tech just has absolutely collapsed.”

Recent interface integrations “are probably just going to be legacy”, he warns, as AI agents can now “talk” to one another.

“You’re going to be able to integrate without the cost of having to manually map and actually make it happen.”

Hutch currently offers six insurance products: landlords, strata, construction, trade pack, management liability and professional indemnity.

It intends to add more this year, and the plan is to have a complete suite of digital products, meaning there is a Hutch option for a broker wanting to place any policy.

With no legacy tech stack, Hutch says it can launch products at a 10th or less of the cost of major insurers.

And it uses public and private third-party data sources to augment underwriting, which in management liability has cut the number of questions to brokers to just four. “It’s really slick,” Mr Johnson says.

Lessons from London

On a trip to the UK earlier this year, Mr Johnson visited about 14 Lloyd’s syndicates and was taken aback by their eagerness to do business – a change from when he started the agency and couldn’t get capacity for two years.

He says since moving to the other side of the negotiating table, he has noticed “just … how similar they all are”.

“You go and see one after the other, and they all have the same strategies. They all want to grow. Almost everybody was pitching for our business. That was extraordinary, the softest I’ve ever seen the market. There’s just so much capacity.

“Investors act in herds, so you get money pouring in. Everybody’s trying to grow … and prices have to go down, and then the market becomes unprofitable.

“Typically, the money that comes in at peak profitability loses … That’s been the market cycle forever.”

The London market is recording “extraordinary” rate drops of up to 50% on major accounts, he says, whereas Australia is “further away from the source of capital, so it takes longer to come here, but it’s now starting to flow through”.

While the whole market is softening, Hutch has seen some “really irrational behaviour” by major competitors in strata, with rates dropping by almost one-third in larger accounts.

“There isn’t room for a 20%-30% drop in strata – it’s a very finely priced, attritional class of business – so it will push the top end of the market into unprofitability very quickly,” Mr Johnson says.

Hutch has chosen to focus on SMEs and “the small stuff”. Mr Johnson says this segment, with a lower average premium, attracts less competition and is less cyclical than products driven by the major global brokers.

“You should be able to ride out the hard and the soft market. If you think about it as a wave, SME is lower amplitude but longer wavelength than mid-market and major. You don’t get the huge spikes in the hard market, but it doesn’t drop as much in the soft.

“But when you do start to see the strata market turn, what you can be assured of is it will just be soft for a really long time.”