Your broker can only present what they understand. The underwriter can only price what they can see. But the conversation that matters most is the one that happens when a claim lands.
Your broker asks about AI at renewal. Someone in your team gives a one-line answer. Your broker passes it through. The underwriter makes a decision based on what they can see.
Twelve months later, a claim lands. The underwriter, who is good at their job, now knows exactly what they are dealing with. The loss file is open. The question is whether the story you told at placement still makes sense in the light of what they now know.
If it does, your insurer is in your corner. If it doesn’t, they are looking for the exit.
The Claim Is Where the Conversation Gets Tested
An informed underwriter knows what they are assessing when they write a risk. But at claims stage, the claims handler, the lawyer examining the file, they will know significantly more. Loss data, product behaviour logs, board minutes, renewal history. Everything.
Your objective is not to get through the renewal conversation. It is to ensure that when the claim is examined under full discovery, your disclosure, your governance, and your broker’s presentation all tell a consistent story. That is the company the insurer defends. The company where the story does not hold up is the company the insurer tries to exit.
Your Broker Is Not Threatened by AI. That Narrative Misses the Point Entirely.
The suggestion that AI will replace the insurance broker is codswallop. Here is why.
You cannot sue AI. You can sue your broker.
Your broker owes you a professional duty of care. If they fail to present your risk properly, if they place you with an insurer who cannot pay, if they miss a material exposure, you have recourse against them. To entertain the idea that AI replaces this, or to spend board time on it, is vanity. It seriously undervalues your business.
Only 5.2 per cent of brokers view AI as the biggest threat to their business. They are right not to. But 78.6 per cent have no plans to adopt AI-driven policy tools, which means most have not yet activated the AI specific value they could be creating for clients. The opportunity is not to replace the broker. It is to equip them.
The broker’s real value here is orchestration. They can facilitate informed discussions between your board and the underwriter about how AI is used in your business, what your ambitions are, and what governance you have in place. That conversation, carried well, creates significant value: better terms, broader cover, durable capacity from an underwriter who understands the risk and wants to write it. No AI tool does that. A good broker does.
The Approach Is Simpler Than You Think
Go in responsively. Provide information when it is requested. Then offer to share more at specific points: at renewal, at mid-term review, before a new AI product goes live.
This does three things. It respects the broker’s process — they know what underwriters ask and when. It creates a disclosure trail that satisfies the Insurance Act 2015 duty of fair presentation — structured, signposted, not a data dump. And it builds the relationship incrementally so the broker understands your AI use well enough to carry the conversation into market with confidence.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/4/part/2
Under the Act, your company must disclose every material circumstance it knows or ought to know. Senior management knowledge is attributed to the company, if your CTO knows how the AI behaves in deployment, the company knows for disclosure purposes, whether or not that reaches the person handling the renewal. A reasonable search is required. Data dumps are prohibited. A responsive, structured approach, sharing the right information at the right time through the broker, is exactly what the duty contemplates.
When your broker asks, four points cover it.
What the AI does in your business
Not “we use AI” but the function, the data it processes, and the outputs it produces. The underwriter needs to see the risk pathway.
Where a human is in the loop
What decisions the AI makes autonomously and where a human reviews or overrides. This maps directly to the liability question at claims stage.
What governance exists at board level
Who owns AI risk. How the model is monitored after deployment. This is the evidence that satisfies both the underwriter and the directors’ duty of care.
What has changed since the last renewal
New models, new data sources, new use cases. This is the material change that triggers disclosure. If your AI programme has evolved and you have not told your broker, the duty of fair presentation requires you to.
The Conversation Is the Cover
The quality of the conversation your broker carries into market is the single biggest determinant of whether your cover responds when it matters. Give them the story the underwriter is waiting for. Make sure it holds when the claim file is opened. The cover follows the conversation.
