UK Distribution Update

18 February, 2026

This week, OpenAI authorised its first insurance distribution app, Tuio. Tuio is “one of Spain’s leading digital insurers”. The news was linked to the biggest drop in the S&P 500 Insurance index since October, with Aon down 8.5% on Friday, Willis 13% and Marsh 7%.

Followers of the insurance market might be reminded of other hotly anticipated and feared events such as Google and Amazon entering the market. Both have now been and gone. 

So is this going to be different? 

We tested Tuio’s ChatGPT app, available in the “Apps” section of the ChatGPT interface. After requesting a home insurance quote, it collects the standard information before presenting an initial price and directing you to the Tuio website. Once there, you’re asked to provide additional details so your quote can be refined, much like the journey with any other insurer. 

In other words, the app streamlines the first step by gathering the basics within ChatGPT, but the moment you’re pushed to the website the experience becomes identical to the traditional process. Not exactly a game‑changer. 

Insurify has also launched its own ChatGPT app. Although it is not available in the UK, the experience differs slightly because Insurify operates as an aggregator. You can, for example, ask it to “show me the best rates in Tennessee for my Toyota Camry,” and it will present a list of quotes from multiple providers. This saves a bit of time compared to navigating to the Insurify website and entering your initial details manually. But again, once you click through to a specific quote, the rest of the journey mirrors what users have always experienced outside ChatGPT. 

Of course, change rarely happens overnight and nothing is going to change even soon. It is also highly unlikely that Tuio is going to make billions off the back of this app. 

But that does not mean that personal lines distribution is never going to change. Whilst insurance is extremely hard to disrupt, it is not impossible. The rise of price comparison websites in the 2000s in the UK is a case in point. 

We provide some thoughts on the potential evolution of personal lines distribution. 

The development of digital distribution: 

• It is almost certain that consumer search will transition gradually to generative AI products. It remains to be seen if Google manages to retain its role as ‘gatekeeper’ to the internet by smartly integrating generative AI into its existing search product (as it is currently doing). Alternative winners are the new platforms like OpenAI/ChatGPT. 
• We think it is unlikely that the platforms themselves will try to build insurance apps and disintermediate the intermediaries. Google discovered that there is more money to be made in insurance advertising than commission on its search portal, and there is no reason to believe that this will be different for an AI platform. That said, the AI platforms do not have an existing revenue stream to cannibalise so could set off in a different direction. (The AI platforms are now, unsurprisingly, introducing ad business models.) 
• Furthermore, it is not obvious that insurance is a sufficiently large category for it to be top of the platform’s list even if they did want to own the category: it needs to be built country-by-country to meet local regulations and processes making it difficult to build and maintain as opposed to other globally homogenous categories like, for example, travel. 
• In markets where digital channels are less established, there is a greater strategic dilemma, but no different to the well-trodden digital vs. offline question that has been asked for many years. Will AI accelerate distribution online faster than to date? It is hard to see the argument – Google is ubiquitous in these markets so the barrier to digital insurance distribution is not general online activity. 

Thoughts and implications for brokers and aggregators:

• Brokers and aggregators could build apps on the AI platforms, whom insurers would need to pay commission. The economics would be broadly unchanged to today – commission would be due to the platform.
• Of course, if brokers and aggregators do not build apps on the AI platforms they could be sidelined. This no doubt explains why MoneySupermarket’s stock is down 8.9% (as of 16 February 2026) over the past 5 days. The challenge for these intermediaries is, of course, that they will be competing against their existing distribution infrastructure. Whilst they may not impact their top line (they will receive similar commissions on both their traditional channels and AI channel) but will have additional maintenance cost. 

Thoughts and implications for insurers:

• We see a low likelihood of AI encouraging new entrants into the risk capital game, although one or two new challengers might emerge as they work out how to trade new channels sooner than others. This is no different to Admiral’s acceleration in the early 2000s off the back of aggregators.
• Some new MGAs might emerge who build capability in AI channels. This is no different to some of the brokers who are specialised in aggregator distribution and have already defined that role in the value chain. 
• Insurers therefore primarily need to maintain market position against existing peers. AI platforms will almost certainly still provide price transparency so price optimisation capabilities are still critical. We see limited impact on insurers other than potentially some distribution strategy work and the cost of ever-increasing complexity.
• A big difference between the traditional aggregator channel and the AI channel could be the importance of product quality. Aggregators were a silver bullet for the price discovery problem in insurance purchasing, but they have never really solved the product quality problem. The AI platforms might be able to use their natural language processing and generation capabilities to provide richer search results. Insurers would need to elevate their AI training optimisation. 
• Carriers who distribute online direct might be the most impacted by new AI platforms. A search for, say, Progressive on Google is fairly ‘linear’ with limited distractions other than some advertising. A future AI proposition might provide more contextual information about the insurer being searched, with a more compelling reason to investigate competitors. 

Overall, we believe that AI could have a major impact on the market, but whether it will fundamentally disrupt its participants long-term is yet to be seen. The rise of aggregators in the UK provides valuable learnings – they changed both everything and nothing in the UK (and literally nothing anywhere else). Ironically, aggregators themselves are most at risk from market disruption and need to secure their route to market in an AI world. Insurers need to anticipate the potential structural changes to the market, identify capabilities they need to refine, and be prepared.