Guidewire survey finds consumers accept AI in insurance, with human oversight

Guidewire’s latest European Insurance Consumer Survey points to a simple design mandate for insurers and software vendors: AI can move deeper into policy, claims, and servicing only if the workflow makes human review visible at every critical step. The company said it has polled more than 4,000 insurance customers each year in the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Germany since 2020, and this year’s survey added questions about pet insurance value for the first time.

The clearest signal came from the UK. Thirty percent of respondents said they would be happy with an insurer using AI to make pricing decisions, while 38% were comfortable with AI helping complete insurance documents and policy applications. Another 39% said they would accept AI supporting human call handlers when answering questions. Those numbers suggest customers are not rejecting automation outright; they are drawing a line around where the machine stops and the human begins.

That boundary is even clearer in the trust data. UK consumers said human intervention was the top condition that makes AI acceptable, at 33%, followed by transparency at 26% and third-party regulation at 23%. In the overall survey, 34% of consumers were comfortable with AI deciding the price of a policy without humans, but 26% said nothing would make them confident in AI use in insurance. Another 39% said the ability to refer an AI decision to a human was the biggest confidence builder, while 25% pointed to explanation and transparency and 25% to an independent regulator.

For claims and service teams, the message is less about flashy automation than about trust architecture. Daily AI users were twice as likely as the general public to trust automated insurance pricing. In the UK, 63% of daily users were comfortable with human-free policy decisions, compared with 30% of the broader population. More than half, 59.5%, were also comfortable with AI deciding and processing claims or determining claim value, versus 27% of UK consumers overall. Even there, Guidewire said daily users still valued transparency and a human in the loop.

Will McAllister, Guidewire’s EMEA managing director, said the industry was at a “material fork in the road” and argued insurers must balance digital implementation with the “fundamental human contract” that underpins the sector. The company’s 2025 survey gives that shift some history: daily AI use among UK insurance customers rose from 5% to 10%, weekly use climbed to 16%, and comfort with AI making insurance decisions without human intervention jumped from 21% to 34%.

The wider consumer backdrop still favors familiar names and cautious adoption. Guidewire said 39% of consumers named a known brand as the top driver when choosing an insurer, and 21% of Gen Z consumers said they use chatbots when choosing an insurer, compared with 9% overall. Concern about natural disasters also eased, from 43% in 2025 to 39% in 2026, while only 31% said they had considered climate-risk cover this year, down from 38%. The direction is clear: AI is entering the insurance workflow, but carriers will win only if the product feels explainable, supervised, and ready to hand off to a person.