Meta’s Muse AI agents may pose a longer-term risk to loss costs if savvy consumers use them to navigate, and potentially litigate, insurance claims, according to Autonomous analysts.
In a recent report, Autonomous put Meta’s Muse to work across shopping, payments, deposit management, investing and insurance to assess what AI assistants can do with consumers’ money today.
For insurance specifically, Autonomous tested Muse’s ability to shop for auto, renters’ and even micro commercial insurance.
Analysts found that Muse sent timely reminders of the mandatory actions needed to get claims moving and even connected them with several law firms that might be able to help maximise a personal auto claim.
The report also found that agentic AI may increase price transparency for simple consumer insurance products.
Autonomous noted that its agent had mixed results fetching real insurance quotes. However, once it was fed the right data, Muse did a decent job summarising various insurance quotes, comparing and contrasting coverage, price, and discount potential.
As consumers increasingly focus on affordability, AI may give insurance buyers greater price transparency and help them make more informed purchasing decisions.
However, Autonomous noted that although Muse could help consumers become smarter insurance buyers, it does not yet outperform an insurance agent.
“Interfacing with our agent was more leisurely than pulling our own quotes from a bunch of different sites, and agentic AI equipped us with information which previously might have been considered ‘inside baseball’ for the average insurance consumer. However, agentic AI doesn’t do anything we couldn’t have accomplished by leveraging an agent or a comparative rater platform,” said Autonomous analysts.
Autonomous believes that underwriters likely to benefit most from the rise of agentic AI are those with a developed direct-to-consumer strategy that are quickest to develop a policy rate plug-in for the most popular platforms, while hindering those that still rely on agents, particularly captives.
Autonomous also warned that agentic AI raises concerns over consumer data privacy and inflated acquisition costs, with many platforms opting to limit Muse’s access.
Analysts added, “AI clearly can help educate and empower people to get more out of their insurance, and we continue to expect potential disruption to extend beyond the shopping process. To the extent agentic AI better informs and enables consumers to execute on rote tasks, we expect consumer willingness to submit and fight for a claim to increase, potentially driving an uptick in frequency and attorney representation. Indeed, perhaps the most severe risk, in our view, posed by agentic and generative AI to the insurance industry is that of increased lawyer involvement. While one may typically think of ambulance chasers, aggressive plaintiffs bars, and sympathetic juries as common drivers of tort inflation, we hypothesise AI in its many forms may need to be added to the list.”
