Artificial intelligence (AI) is the canary in the coal mine for the insurance industry, and the industry needs to prepare for what’s coming, speakers said May 11 at Insurance Brokers Association of Alberta’s Convention 2026 in Banff.
“This is the insurance Napster moment,” says Pete Tessier, president of MGA Taycon Risk and the Canadian Association of Managing General Agents (CAMGA), referring to the music sharing service that faced a copyright infringement lawsuit and was shut down in 2001.
“All of you in your offices have clients, that’s your music library,” Tessier says while moderating a Carrier CEO Panel at the conference. “You’re going to have to decide if you’re going to let AI come and take it from you, or if you’re going to own the AI and the technology.
“That’s the mistake the music industry made, and now they give away a million streams, and they get 12 cents for it.”
As an example, Tessier says he helped build an AI underwriting assistant, which took 28 minutes and could compare inspection reports against submission forms to see what was accurate.
“And if you put your heads in the sand and ignore it, there are going to be changes that you don’t want happening,” Tessier says. “It’s coming…it scares me a lot, because I don’t think we get the wave of this…”
Number 1 topic
Evan Johnston, president and CEO of Wawanesa, says he was in Europe about two weeks ago, talking to approximately 20 insurance company CEOs about what was happening in the industry and what we could probably expect to see in Canada. The topics ranged from talent to climate change and others, but the Number 1 topic was AI, Johnston says.
“It’s very clear to me that AI is going to change this industry, and it’s certainly going to change our organization,” Johnston says. “And when I talked to that group of leaders…there were some that were way ahead of us [and] some that were completely denying that this was happening.”
He adds Wawanesa hasn’t really used AI to “change customer experience, but that’s coming.
“The examples and the models that we saw just completely blew my mind,” Johnston says. “So to deny this is going to change our industry, I think, is negligent.”
Louis Gagnon, CEO of Canada for Intact Financial Corporation, recommends the industry use AI as much as possible — “test it, call places where you know that they’re using AI, look at what they do, how they do it, if the experience is good or the experience is not good…
“Ask your accountant to do a little exercise on how much he’s going to charge you, and do it on AI to see what’s the outcome,” Gagnon says. “And I’m not teasing here.”
Full transformation
Within five years, Gagnon predicts AI will transform the ways consumers are shopping. It will also transform the industry through claims and broker relationships, as well as provide industry professionals a chance to spend more time on value-added activity, he suggests.
“I think it’s also going to cut jobs,” Gagnon says. “I think it’s going to reduce the number of people in [an] organization…and it’s going to transform the workforce.
“So, I really think we cannot put our head in the sand and just think that, ‘Well, we’re going to be okay. Things are going to be a bit different. We’re going to be better,’” he says. “I think it’s going to be a bigger change than that.
“So, I think it’s fundamental that we test it, we try it, we play with it, and we try to see in our business where we can implement it,” Gagnon says, adding that some things will go wrong with AI.
“I also think that people in general are going to be very hungry and thirsty for human contacts,” he says. “They are going to be very, very happy to talk to people, to shake hands, to [look] people in the eyes. There’s going to be also that aspect that will not go away.”
Nav Dhillon, CEO of Aviva Canada, agrees the relationship element of insurance will not disappear.
“When a customer has just gone [through] a devastating event and wants to talk to somebody and ensure that their most-loved possessions are back with them or their home [is] rebuilt, [that] won’t go away.”
Dhillon also doesn’t see an end of the industry because of the core purpose of insurance — to help get people back on track.
“This industry has been around for centuries,” he says. “Aviva has been around for over 325 years. It will be around for another 325 or more.”