A friend rang me at the weekend about an argument going round a WhatsApp group.
Someone was worried they weren’t spending enough on their home insurance, and couldn’t work out whether they were covered for the things that mattered most to them.
What stopped me wasn’t the worry. It was who was worried. These were people who work in financial services, who understand this industry.
If they can’t tell whether they’re covered, then the problem was never the consumer. It’s the product.
Hold that thought, because 2027 is going to test it.
EY and Oxbow Partners both expect motor premiums to climb again, EY putting it near 12% after a further 4% in 2026. On an average bill, that’s £50 to £60 minimum. After two quiet years of falling prices and little switching, a rise like that will send people back out to shop in their millions.
And that’s good news. Good for the comparison sites, good for new entrants bringing fresh value into a sluggish market, good for competition.
But only if we’re honest about one thing.
This time, people won’t shop the way they used to. AI agents are starting to do the comparing, and they strip out the friction that’s quietly kept customers loyal for years. So switching won’t just rise. It’ll accelerate.
And when a machine sorts on headline price alone, the hollowed-out product wins the click. The consumer thinks they’ve bought the same cover for less, right up until the moment of claim, when they discover what they gave away without knowing they’d given it.
But here’s the twist, and the part I’m most optimistic about.
AI doesn’t have to commoditise insurance. It could be the thing that finally makes it make sense.
An AI that genuinely knows you, your home, the things you could never bear to lose, can read a dense policy on your behalf and answer the one question this industry has made almost impossible to answer for yourself.
Am I covered?
For the first time, an ordinary person could interrogate a complex product with something intelligent in their corner. That isn’t the enemy of trust. It’s how you rebuild it.
Because insurance isn’t really a price. It’s a contract of trust. A single promise, that someone will be there when things go wrong. Everything else is plumbing around that promise. Churn between products people don’t understand doesn’t build trust. It quietly spends it.
So my prediction for 2027 is easy in one half and hard in the other.
Shopping and switching will surge. Who wins is wide open. I think it’ll be whoever uses this moment to make cover legible at the point people are choosing, so that switching on price never means unknowingly switching away value.
And that’s the bit I don’t know. In a market where the shopping is automated and the cover is increasingly opaque, who do you trust to help people ask, and truly answer, am I covered?
The insurers? The comparison sites? The newcomers? Or something that doesn’t exist yet?
I would genuinely like to know what you think. Tell me.