Artificial intelligence is reshaping insurance underwriting and claims, but it is strengthening the role of agents and brokers rather than eliminating it, according to Rob Galbraith, founder and CEO of Forestview Insights. Galbraith, author of "The End of Insurance as We Know It," said the industry has moved through several distinct waves of technological change and is now entering a period where AI sits at the center of business strategy.
"In the past, AI was just another tool in the toolbox," Galbraith said. "Increasingly, I'm seeing AI front and center, at the heart of organizations, and companies grappling with what that means from a technology, human capital, competitive and value proposition standpoint." That shift from peripheral tool to core strategy is a central focus of AI for Insurance.
Why agents and brokers are not being disintermediated
Galbraith said insurance differs fundamentally from industries like travel and ground transportation, where technology eliminated transactional friction rather than genuine advice. He argued that the stakes of a poor decision in insurance, an infrequent purchase that functions as both a financial and legal contract, are too high for AI to fully replace the counsel that agents and brokers provide.
"If you make the wrong purchase on your own, you can't return a policy after a denied claim," he said. "It's complex, it's nebulous, and the cost of getting it wrong is high. That's very different from choosing the wrong airline or rideshare company."
Instead, Galbraith said AI is enabling far greater pricing and underwriting precision. He pointed to telematics replacing broad proxy variables such as age, gender and marital status with direct observation of individual driving behavior, citing his own daughter's experience getting a learner's permit as an example of how granular, AI-driven risk assessment is replacing generalized actuarial assumptions.
Build-versus-buy is dead
On technology strategy, Galbraith said the traditional build-versus-buy debate has become obsolete, replaced by a sharper question of partner versus purpose. He recounted leading a wildfire risk modeling project at a carrier where an in-house team initially outperformed every commercially available model, only for the firm to eventually pivot to outside vendors once dedicated catastrophe modeling companies could out-invest and out-data the carrier's internal effort.
"What is core to your competitive advantage, your purpose? Keep that in-house," he said. "Everything else, partner." He added that the rise of low-code and no-code platforms is now allowing subject matter experts, rather than dedicated technical teams, to design and maintain new insurance products directly.
What 'Fosbury Flop' moments mean for the next decade
Looking toward 2027 and beyond, Galbraith said the pace of technological change in insurance underwriting and claims automation continues accelerating in step-changes rather than gradual progress, an idea he compares to Dick Fosbury's revolutionary high-jump technique at the 1968 Olympics. He calls these leaps Fosbury Flop moments. "That's the mode we're in now," he said. "ChatGPT comes along and suddenly AI is at a completely different level. Everyone refines it, and then there's the next leap. Those Fosbury Flop moments are happening more and more regularly."
Galbraith referenced a 10-10 rule, under which emerging technology typically takes roughly a decade to move from concept to practical use, then another decade to scale broadly, suggesting agentic AI may only now be entering its scaling phase. The rise of agentic AI, which Galbraith says may now be entering its scaling phase, is a key theme in AI Agents & Automation. He noted that cloud computing and software-as-a-service tools have already leveled the playing field for niche and smaller players that previously could not afford enterprise-grade systems.
Still, Galbraith said true competitive disruption within insurance, the kind that displaces legacy incumbents the way ride-hailing displaced taxis, has yet to materialize at scale, pointing to insurers' ongoing coverage of insurtech challengers and their market performance as a useful gauge of how incremental that disruption has been so far. "We're prone to assuming everything is incremental, everything is linear, and the big keep getting bigger," he said. "I don't think that'll always be the case."
Why this matters for insurance professionals
Galbraith's analysis suggests that AI will not replace insurance advisors but will instead become a core part of how they operate. Professionals who understand how to partner with technology vendors, focus on their unique advisory strengths, and prepare for rapid, non-linear advances in AI capabilities will be best positioned. The shift from AI as a tool to AI as the strategic center means that every insurance professional, from underwriters to brokers, needs a working knowledge of how these systems function and where they add value.
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