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Industry June 11, 2026 4 min read

AI will create millions of new protection policies

Around 31 million UK adults hold no pure protection product, and 18 million have never actively considered their protection needs. The protection gap in 2026 is a conversation gap — and conversational AI, which more than half of UK adults now use, is the technology that will finally close it.

Alain Desmier
Alain Desmier June 11, 2026
A woman arranging a protection policy through an AI conversation

This article was first published by Cover Magazine on 11 June 2026.

Modern protection is built around process, portals and persistence, and for the last decade we've been obsessed with advertising algorithms, quick quotes and speed to dial. Has it worked?

According to the FCA, a large proportion of the UK population remains outside the protection market. Around 31 million adults hold no pure protection product and 18 million have never actively considered their protection needs.

Why do these people not want to talk to us? The protection gap in 2026 is a conversation gap.

Start the conversation

Consumers are, however, talking freely about their hopes and fears to an unlikely confidant. Ofcom suggests that more than half (54%) of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and adoption is particularly driven by younger adults (79% of 16 to 24s and 74% of 25 to 34s). UK adult use of these tools went from 31% to 54% in a single year, faster than even iPhone adoption in the late 2000s.

It's more than a few downloads and creating funny videos. A growing body of academic research suggests that conversational AI is excellent at uncovering customer needs, identifying signals of vulnerability and gathering the information required to escalate to a human in the loop.

Why would someone talk to an AI chatbot about deeply personal life history? Because it feels safer to declare a history of mental illness, alcohol consumption or debt, tapping away on your phone, than it is to speak to someone in a busy call centre. On sensitive subjects, people disclose more openly to a machine than to another person, because a machine does not trigger the fear of being judged.

This is where we start.

Better AI conversations create better outcomes

Once we are open to listening to what a consumer has to say without judgement, wherever they want to say it, we can start designing protection products and responses that look like consumer prompts.

Designed around the consumer, an AI agent can quickly clarify consumer intention and then deploy a series of conversational tools across web chat, SMS, phone, WhatsApp or email that become a way back into the chat.

In a market where appropriate cover depends on honest disclosure, and where the duty to recognise vulnerability is central to good conduct, unstructured conversational text gives us more ways to recognise and protect people.

Some consumers will want to complete the protection conversation online, others will feel more comfortable being transferred to a human, but the point is that we started the conversation around the needs of the customer on their own terms.

AI is a distribution channel

For decades, direct distribution in protection has been constrained by cost. Reaching consumers one at a time meant expensive advertising campaigns, large call centre teams and long application journeys. Whole segments of our population were unprofitable to serve and so we ignored them. AI changes that equation.

A single agent can hold thousands of conversations at once, answer questions as they arise at any time of day, explain a complex product in plain language, and carry the context of an enquiry across channels for weeks at a time, at a fraction of the cost of a lead generation campaign.

For the first time an insurer can directly target people who would never visit a comparison site or call an adviser. With skill, planning and testing, the protection industry can adapt conversational AI to listen, converse, understand and escalate.

Millions of protection policies, sold by AI

The next million protection policies will not come from better lead gen forms, shorter applications or marginal improvements in contact rate conversion. Those sales will come from millions of new conversations propelled by AI.

AI is not simply new technology, it will eventually become the first responder to any new protection enquiry.

If, as I believe, the protection gap is a conversation gap, then AI is the technology that will finally close it.

Alain Desmier is co-founder of Subcontext

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