I let my agent shop for insurance

We often think about the moment we can use AI to find us information, but the step after that is asking an agent to go and do the work for you and leaving it.

So we decided to test this. In the last week I got Klara, my project manager, to get me house insurance. She did the research, chose who to contact, filled out the online forms and worked through the emails with brokers. I gave her enough permissions to access the tools she needed, and I left her to make the judgment calls on who might be the right ones to contact. She didn't do the credit card details. I did that.

One rule I gave her was that everything had to be by email or online, because I didn't want to take any calls. That was partly just to push the experiment along, and it worked well.

Klara started in my inbox. She found the pack from my last renewal, which gave her most of what an insurer wants to know about the house. Then she chose five insurers and brokers and wrote to each of them on my behalf, after showing me the first one. She also filled in the six steps of a comparison site's form, which gave us our first real prices that same day.

Klara asked me questions along the way when she didn't have something, like how many bathrooms we have and what kind of locks are on the doors. One broker sent a long list of questions, and she could already answer some of them. She drafted the replies, and anything about the cover or a new fact about the house came to me first. I pressed send on all of them myself.

Of the five she wrote to, two never replied. Two brokers came back with prices after a few days, and each of them wanted more detail first. The fifth wrote back to say it doesn't quote new customers by email, so it was its own online form, a phone call or a call back. So Klara went to the form.

The form was harder than it should have been. The site blocked Klara's browser on one of my computers as an automated visitor, so she did it on my laptop in my own browser. She stopped and got me to read the terms and actually pay.

We ended up comparing three quotes for the same house and the same sums insured. The two from the brokers were close together, and the one from the insurer's own form was a lot lower.

The two broker quotes were 24% and 25% higher than the one we took. So we saved about 19% against the next best price, on what looks like a higher excess, and we're paying about 14% less than my last renewal offer, which insured the house for less.

So what do brands do about this? The truth is, this feels like it's going to be commonplace pretty soon. I think brands need to actively think about whether they're going to make it easy for robots to do this, whether they're going to block them, or whether they're going to have their own robots deal with them.

And how do they compete when the robots are not persuaded by the more emotional kind of messaging? They can see pictures, but they are looking for detail, and they'll demand a lot of it at speed. The number of requests coming into a business will be higher, and the requests for information will be far more detailed.

So this is about the entire journey. The question goes beyond whether I'm going to get found by an agent. Am I making it easy to get bought, am I blocking it, or am I using all the skills of a marketer to compete and win?