AI is emerging as an advice channel in health insurance — but how good is that advice already?
Comparison sites still dominate the switching market for health insurance. Their reasoning is relatively flat: premium first, cover a distant second. The market has criticised that for years. AI is now emerging as a new advice channel, promising far richer and more personal advice. Last campaign we tested how good that advice really is.
Why this channel looks different from the previous ones
Every time a new channel appears, the discussion turns on the same question: does power in the distribution chain shift, or only its form? With comparison sites it was the former. They became the de facto gatekeeper of the switching market, with an advice model that steers heavily on premium and forces insurers to design their proposition around it.
AI advice is fundamentally different in nature. The channel has no referral-based revenue model, no fixed ordering and no fixed decision framework. What it does have is the ability to ask the question behind the question: which care someone uses, which practitioner they want to keep, what the deductible means given expected usage. Precisely the trade-off a comparison site does not make.
What the test showed
The models were given the same profiles a consumer with a concrete care need would bring. The outcome is twofold. The advice is substantively stronger than expected: the models probe further, weigh cover and explain why a policy fits. At the same time the advice is fragile on exactly the point that matters — the current year's premiums and policy conditions. Where those are missing, the advice falls back on generalities or on outdated data.
That is where the task lies for insurers. Not in whether AI becomes a channel, but in whether current product information is findable and machine-readable for that channel. Those who do not arrange it will soon be advised on the basis of last year.
A comparison site can be played as an insurer. An AI adviser mostly has to be fed — or not.
What this means for the campaign
The switching market is small and volatile, and every channel that inserts itself between consumer and insurer changes the cost of acquiring a new customer. AI advice is still marginal in volume, but it is growing in a market where consumers are engaging with substance again for the first time in years. That is an opportunity for players with strong cover and a complicated story — precisely the players who cannot win on premium alone.