Brokers’ use of AI to aid compliance was up for debate at a conference hosted by insurtech Curium in Sydney.

BMIA Broker Network GM Debbi Thorne was positive and felt brokers are “still not taking AI as seriously as we should. It’s not there to replace any of us. It helps efficiencies, frees up mundane tasks and records conversations with clients.

“We can take better documents and notes, and it gives us more face-to-face time.”

But she fears others in the industry assume AI will take over from staff, especially older employees.

“My worry is that we will rely on AI to give advice, but AI can’t dig through or look at a client’s face, or what they’re telling you.”

She says a bigger issue is training staff and getting more people into the industry.

“We have a knowledge and people gap and AI is not going to fill that. There’s no learning paths to broking and insurance – there used to be courses you could do. AI’s not perfect yet and how do we challenge it if we don’t have the knowledge?”

Strata specialist BAC Insurance Brokers’ COO Mitchell Lipscombe told the conference last month that his views may be “controversial, but I think it’s a fallacy that AI will not be a substitute for advice. If advice connects someone’s objectives, situation and needs with a product, surely the aggregate of human knowledge can do this as well."

He says consumers “are no longer tolerant of our inefficiencies. A lot of money goes on solving inefficiencies and, as they become more engaged and informed and use AI more, they don’t want to pay for inefficiency.”

He says the regulatory, political and media focus on strata in recent years has created “an interesting tension. Everyone is talking about scale and hyperefficiency, but it has eroded a lot of consumer trust in terms of how we distribute strata products and services. The future is grand, but we can’t just assume we have a place in it.”

He says brokers overall need to be more future-focused and develop better models.

“We have a lot of senior brokers reacting to the here and now issues like dealing with consumer expectations, dealing with regulatory issues, and insurers trying to decommoditise products, and as a result don’t have the capacity to spend some time off the dancefloor and on the balcony."

Network Insurance House head of risk and compliance Allana Dynon says many brokers, especially ones that have merged, “don’t have a good enough handle on data. A lot of systems have been mashed together and I don’t think we have clean data.”