AI agents interacting and agreeing premium settings and other underwriting choices is the next tech challenge facing the insurance industry, BizCover CIO Dino Tius says.

Mr Tius says regulation is “definitely a challenge” for new technology as AI heavyweights such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI try to “figure out how they’re going to monetise this”.

“ChatGPT has just released paid adverts in financial services so they’re making progress, and I think once they solve that problem then there’ll be a bigger push and it will be clearer what we should be doing,” Mr Tius said during the opening session of Insurance News’ Beyond the Buzzwords conference last week.

AUB-backed BizCover recently created the first insurance app in Australia to offer SME insurance quoting within ChatGPT.

So far, the quotes are indicative only and the app does not transact sales.

Mr Tius said an OpenAI agentic-to-agentic pilot product is for sale in the US and suited to financial services, but it is not yet accessible in Australia.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘This is exciting – let's go,’ but they said, “Well, we think we’re at least 12 months out before there’s a solution in Australia to continue the journey and purchase with ChatGPT.’

“Moving forward, the problem the industry has to solve is, how do we do agentic to agentic? That’s a real question – and then that’s when those risks come in and the regulatory hurdles to jump ... There’s a lot of a lot of unanswered questions at this time.”

In a generative AI agentic-to-agentic solution, the AI is given a task to do and agents will “talk together” and agree on solutions.

“This is pretty scary, to think about what will follow in the future where the agentic does the pricing and the underwriting, and also improves over time. So if it makes a mistake, it knows – maybe through feedback from the other agents – and it becomes a closed loop and continuous improvement.”