Five angles this week

Observation

Insurity's April 21 survey of over 1,000 US consumers found that support for AI in P&C insurance nearly doubled year-over-year — reaching 39% in 2026, up from 20% in 2025. But the data drew a sharp line between AI as an assistance tool (46% comfortable with AI generating a quote) and AI as a decision-maker (22% comfortable with AI filing a claim on their behalf, 16% comfortable with AI cancelling or renewing a policy autonomously).

Angle

Consumer acceptance is rising, but it is acceptance of AI as a supporting actor, not a lead. The carriers interpreting the improved approval ratings as a green light for autonomous decision-making are misreading the signal. Tolerance is for AI that helps people faster; resistance is for AI that replaces the human moment in high-stakes transactions. Those are different product design briefs.

Implication for P&C carriers

Customer experience strategies built around autonomous AI for claims filing, policy renewal, or cancellation will encounter trust resistance that data alone will not resolve. The design question for 2026 is not how much AI to deploy in customer-facing roles — it is how to make human oversight visible and credible when AI is involved. Carriers who make that human oversight legible will outperform those who optimise for autonomy on the metrics that drive long-term retention.

Observation

The Verisk/ISO generative AI exclusion endorsements — CG 40 47 and CG 40 48 — became effective January 1, 2026, allowing carriers to explicitly exclude claims arising from generative AI outputs from CGL policies. Multiple insurers filed to adopt the new wordings within weeks of the announcement, and Verisk reported strong carrier interest. The forms affect a policy template infrastructure underpinning approximately 82% of global P&C policies.

Angle

The industry is treating these exclusions primarily as a coverage question for commercial policyholders. The more immediate issue for P&C carriers is the inverse: the same CGL policies carriers use to protect their own operations are being rewritten to exclude AI-related claims. A carrier deploying AI at scale across claims, underwriting, and customer service may be creating liability exposure that its own insurance programme no longer covers.

Implication for P&C carriers

Risk management and legal teams need to audit their own insurance programmes against the CG 40 47/48 language — specifically whether carriers' own CGL, E&O, and D&O policies have adopted equivalent exclusions, and whether the carrier's AI deployments would fall within those exclusions as a claimant. This is not theoretical: the carriers most exposed are those who deployed AI rapidly in 2024–2025 without a parallel review of their own coverage position.

Observation

A Carrier Management feature published April 23 documented how leading insurers are deploying AI — including machine learning models, satellite imagery integration, digital twins, and IoT-connected platforms — to shift catastrophe risk management from periodic analysis to real-time exposure monitoring, enabling dynamic underwriting adjustments and same-day post-event claims triage.

Angle

CAT modelling has historically operated on annual or quarterly cycles. AI-enabled real-time exposure monitoring changes the operating model for the CAT function itself — from periodic analysis to continuous portfolio surveillance. That is an organisational and governance change as much as a technology one. A CAT team still structured around quarterly exposure reviews cannot operationalise real-time data even if the platform delivers it.

Implication for P&C carriers

CROs and CAT managers at property-heavy carriers should assess whether their CAT governance model — reporting cadence, decision rights, underwriting authority thresholds — is structured to act on real-time exposure signals. A platform that delivers live data into a quarterly decision process produces limited value. The competitive advantage of real-time CAT capability is only realised when the organisational structure is redesigned to use it.

Observation

Analysis published in April 2026 documented that reinsurers — with Munich Re's aiSure product as the leading example — are pricing and underwriting AI performance risk through performance warranties and liability indemnification structures. These products allow companies to indemnify clients for financial losses or legal liabilities from AI errors. Primary P&C carriers remain largely absent from the design of this emerging risk transfer architecture.

Angle

The risk transfer architecture for AI liability is being constructed by reinsurers and specialty markets without meaningful primary carrier input. The definitions being established now — how AI errors are categorised, what indemnification triggers look like, how performance warranties relate to underlying policy coverage — will shape the primary market's options for the next decade. Carriers not engaged in this conversation will be price-takers when the market matures.

Implication for P&C carriers

Chief Underwriting Officers and Chief Risk Officers at primary carriers should be in active dialogue with their reinsurance partners about how AI risk is being structured at the treaty level. The early conversations are happening now, and the conventions being established are not yet hardened. Carriers who engage now can influence the architecture; those who wait will inherit it.

Observation

Legal commentary published in April 2026 noted that the broad language of new AI exclusion endorsements — covering claims "arising from" generative AI outputs — is already drawing scrutiny from coverage attorneys. The core dispute is whether the exclusions apply when AI is one of several contributing factors to a loss, or only when it is the proximate cause.

Angle

Insurance policy language always outpaces the litigation that interprets it. Carriers rushing to adopt broad AI exclusions are writing language that will be tested in courts that have not yet developed AI coverage doctrine. The exclusions may be broader than carriers can defend, or narrower than intended — the ambiguity is a litigation factory. The carriers who assumed the new ISO forms resolved their AI exposure have not yet seen the claim that tests that assumption.

Implication for P&C carriers

Underwriting and claims teams adopting the CG 40 47/48 wordings should work with coverage counsel now to establish internal position papers on how the exclusions will be applied in specific claim scenarios — before litigation forces the issue. The carriers who have done this work will respond to the first significant AI coverage dispute from a position of preparation; those who have not will define their position in the adversarial context of a claim, at the worst possible moment.