‘AI isn’t a free ticket,’ Clear Group leader warns brokers

Brokers risk falling behind insurers on artificial intelligence (AI) adoption unless they tackle the “hard yards” of operational excellence first, according to Phil Williams, Clear Group’s group chief commercial officer and managing director of retail.

Speaking at the Chartered Insurance Institute’s conference Shaping the Future of Insurance: Innovation and Impact on 1 October 2025, Williams told the audience that insurers had been quicker to deploy AI at scale thanks to standardised processes, while brokers had tended to outsource technology requirements to platforms such as Acturis.

He said: “I found about three and a half times more global use cases for insurer implementations of AI than for broker implementations of AI. The insurers are ingesting client presentations and presenting these to underwriting teams to make decisioning – you don’t hear those conversations being led out by brokers in the same way.”

Williams explained that the difference came down to how businesses were structured. “If you look at commercial broking, the reason that Acturis is so dominant in the market is that brokers feel like they can outsource their technology requirements, outsource their innovation departments to it and not focus that on as an order winner,” he said.

He contrasted this with insurers, which had standardised workflows that made it easier to deploy AI to specific tasks.

“You can’t offshore thousands of back office functions unless you’ve standardised your workflows,” he said. “Brokers need to go through a process of, frankly, hard work – the basics of operational excellence – before AI can really deliver.”

Challenges ahead

Williams also warned against assuming that widespread prompt engineering skills would solve the adoption challenge.

“The idea that we can train our entire workforces to be prompt engineers is a step too far,” he said. “What we need to be thinking about is running businesses in a very focused way and doing the hard yards, because AI isn’t a free ticket.”

A live poll during the session underlined industry uncertainty. When asked whether the broking sector was set up to develop AI use cases, 68% of attendees said “somewhat, but there are challenges”, while 18% said “no, the industry is not ready”.

Williams added that smaller brokers should not be discouraged from experimenting with affordable, off-the-shelf tools, but emphasised that the focus must remain on delivering client value.

“My top tip for brokers would be to think about operational excellence in general – be a good broker first and foremost, then think how AI might help some of that,” he said.

Read: Brokers are ‘logical latecomers’ to AI use as ‘old guard’ believe in certain way of doing tasks