"This will be an incredible opportunity to engage the protection gap, and we all need to be ready."
- Alain Desmier - Subcontext
Subcontext has revealed the results of its first AI Ready Index for UK protection businesses.
The audit documents the results of sending AI assistants with a real identity, phone number and payment card to buy life insurance from every insurer, broker and partnership brand in the UK that sells protection online.
The AI assistants visited 110 protection websites, 12 of which had a real-time quote and purchase journey good enough for an AI assistant to get through, while 85 protection websites had done no AI planning at all.
Subcontext’s Index placed every website in one of three groups, graded on what the AI assistant could do.
12 websites came under 'accidental AI sellers', as they gave the AI assistant a price through their standard customer quote journey, with no apparent recognition that it was an AI. Those quotes came from just five insurers.
13 more websites came under 'taking first steps into AI', having written something for an AI assistant, an llms.txt page or AI agents named in robots.txt. This means that someone has thought about AI but not given it a route to buy.
85 websites came under 'have not considered AI', meaning the AI assistant got in and found nothing, or in 3 cases was blocked from getting in.
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The research follows news from the US, where Meta launched its AI assistant Muse in September. Since then, millions of US users have signed up and have begun to use Muse as a personal shopper.
Insurify, which has served more than 330 million insurance quotes, initially blocked Muse from its marketplace until 28th October, when it opened an AI Agent Gateway so that Muse, OpenAI's Dots and others can quote from its carriers under its rules.
"Consumers increasingly want to use AI assistants like Grok and ChatGPT to save them time, but the majority of protection websites are not ready," Alain Desmier, co-founder of Subcontext, said.
"Most of the insurance businesses our AI assistants visited have not even configured an agents.txt file that tells an AI assistant where to look.
"Our index is not about naming and shaming protection businesses. Rather, we want to sound the alarm that AI assistant shopping is coming, and UK protection is not ready.
"When Muse reaches the UK, millions of people will download the app and start to use AI to shop for all sorts of things. This will be an incredible opportunity to engage the protection gap, and we all need to be ready."
