Speed isn't enough - brokers must still lead on coverage quality

Michael Williams ; 2025-12-03 13:13:50

Efficiency gains won’t matter if brokers can't deliver better, more competitive coverage

Transformation

By Chris Davis

Dec 03, 2025Share

Getting quotes faster isn't a win if the coverage doesn’t hold up. For Jane Tran (pictured), co-founder and COO of Sixfold, that’s where the industry is missing the point on AI adoption.

“Our customers expect us to give them better coverage, more competitive coverage, and more comprehensive coverage,” she said. “Just getting a quote faster - if it’s not better, if it doesn’t fit those three things - it’s actually just not good for coverage, and for your relationships in the long term.”

While much of the insurance sector is focused on digitizing for efficiency, Tran cautioned that real value lies elsewhere. For brokers, that means staying aligned with underwriters, who share the same long-term goals. “As brokers are working with different carriers and different underwriters, that's something that is still an open conversation that actually is more aligned than not,” she said.

Tran stressed that strong underwriting, trust, and expertise will remain the true differentiators. “With all of this new technology that's coming out, there's always a lot of emphasis on productivity gains, which is great,” she said. “But actually, in five years’ time, that may just be table stakes.”

Digital tools won’t replace human skills - they’ll expose the gaps

Self-service tools and digital workflows aren’t threats to brokers - they’re a filter. For Tran, the rise of automation will increase the value of human connection, not reduce it.

“These self-service tools are great, and they're usually only great for sometimes a small, maybe the mid-market business,” she said. With more catastrophe risk and growing complexity in commercial lines, brokers will need to lean into their strengths - particularly where tech can’t follow.

“If you can automate or digitize some of the smaller business so the broker has more capacity to come up with more creative solutions... that’s really great,” Tran said. “In that instance, I do think more of the soft skills, those relationships, are going to be much more important - because those things you can’t automate.”

Brokers who understand this shift will benefit from a reallocation of time: less spent on transactional quoting, more on advisory value. The differentiators in the coming years won’t be in how fast you process a quote - but in how well you manage risk, understand nuance, and deliver strategic support to clients who expect more than automation.

AI and underwriting: from reactive to strategic

Tran sees the greater promise of AI in how it enhances risk qualification and commercial underwriting. While the industry has long dealt with large datasets, its ability to extract insight has lagged behind.

“We have a lot more data - for better, for worse, candidly - but we also have the toolsets to understand the noise within that data and how to make better decisions,” she said.

As computing power catches up with data volume, insurers can finally move past the grunt work and into real-time portfolio intelligence. Tran pointed to London’s shift toward portfolio-based underwriting as a signal of this trend. “The more that you move - how we use the data, the decisions that we make, and its impact on our broader portfolio - then I think everyone sort of wins within this model,” she said.

The challenge will be applying these tools to broader market conditions and emerging risks. Cyber, climate, and intangible exposures are evolving too quickly for traditional actuarial models to keep up. Tran suggested that AI will enable insurers to respond faster and more intelligently to those risks, provided the systems are in place to act on what the data shows.