Insurance has a problem it refuses to talk about honestly. The entire industry is built on the assumption that consumers are incapable of representing themselves well, that they need gatekeepers at every step, and that complexity is a feature rather than a bug. I have spent the last decade watching this from the inside, first as a broker building one of Australasia's fastest-growing insurance businesses, and now as someone building the infrastructure to change how the whole system works.
This year I launched something that did not exist before: an MCP-enabled insurance marketplace. If you are not familiar with MCP, it stands for Model Context Protocol, an open standard created by Anthropic that allows AI systems to connect to external tools and data sources in a structured, secure way. In practical terms, it means your AI assistant can now interact directly with our insurance marketplace on your behalf, gathering quotes, comparing options, and submitting applications with a level of detail and accuracy that most humans struggle to achieve manually.
The Problem with Insurance Today
If you have ever tried to get a commercial insurance quote, you know the pain. You fill out long forms with questions you barely understand. You guess at values for things like replacement costs, revenue projections, and risk exposures. You submit incomplete information because you did not know what the insurer actually needed, and then you wait days or weeks while someone manually reviews your application, asks follow-up questions, and eventually comes back with a quote that may or may not reflect your actual risk profile.
The result is that consumers consistently undersell themselves. They provide incomplete information, they miss details that could lower their premiums, and they end up with coverage that does not properly match their needs. The industry knows this, and yet the response has been to add more intermediaries rather than to empower the consumer to do a better job in the first place.
What MCP Changes
MCP is not about replacing brokers or providing automated advice. That is an important distinction, and one the industry needs to understand clearly. What MCP enables is something far more powerful and far less threatening: it lets consumers leverage their own AI to prepare better submissions.
Think about what happens when your AI assistant connects to our marketplace through MCP. It already has context about your business because you work with it every day. It understands your operations, your revenue, your assets, your risk exposures. When it connects to the insurance marketplace, it can translate all of that context into a comprehensive, well-structured application that answers every question the insurer needs answered, often with more detail and accuracy than a human filling out forms manually could achieve.
This is not robo-advice. Your AI is not telling you which policy to buy. It is helping you present yourself to the market in the most complete and accurate way possible, and then real brokers compete for your business based on that submission. The consumer gets better quotes because the submission is bulletproof. The broker gets a better client because the information is thorough and accurate. The insurer gets a better risk assessment because the data is comprehensive. Everyone wins.
Why the Industry Should Embrace This
The insurance industry's instinctive reaction to anything involving AI and consumers is to reach for the "robo-advice" panic button. Regulators worry about unlicensed advice being delivered at scale, and incumbents worry about disintermediation. Both fears, while understandable, completely miss what is actually happening here.
When a consumer uses their own AI to help them fill out an insurance application, that is no different from them asking a knowledgeable friend to help them understand the questions. The AI is not recommending products, it is not comparing policies on a qualitative basis, and it is not making suitability assessments. It is simply helping the consumer articulate their own situation more effectively.
The irony is that the insurance industry has spent decades complaining about poor quality submissions, incomplete data, and consumers who do not understand what they are buying. Now we have a technology that directly addresses all of those complaints by enabling consumers to submit higher quality, more complete applications, and the industry's first instinct is to resist it.
Agent-to-Agent Insurance is Coming
What we have built with CoverMy is the beginning of something much larger. Right now, your AI connects to our marketplace to help you get insurance quotes. In the near future, the broker's AI will receive that submission, assess it, and respond with tailored options. The insurer's AI will evaluate the risk and price it accordingly. The entire chain from consumer need to bound policy will be an agent-to-agent conversation, with humans providing oversight and final decisions at the points where they add the most value.
This is not science fiction, and it is not decades away. The protocols exist today. MCP, A2A, and ACP are all shipping and being adopted across industries. Insurance is just one of the last major industries to start taking this seriously, largely because the regulatory environment moves slowly and the incumbents have limited incentive to make things easier for consumers.
Power to the Consumer
I have always believed that the best businesses are the ones that shift power toward the consumer. When we started Shielded, we took an industry that made it deliberately difficult for high-risk clients to get coverage and built a technology-driven process that made it straightforward. With CoverMy, we are taking the same philosophy further: consumers should not need to be insurance experts to get a fair deal, and they should absolutely be able to use their own tools and technology to level the playing field.
The archaic parts of insurance, the paper forms, the phone tag, the information asymmetry that favours the insurer over the insured, those are not features of a healthy industry. They are symptoms of an industry that has not been forced to modernise because the barriers to entry have kept competition limited and consumer expectations low.
That is changing now. AI is the great equaliser, and the businesses that embrace consumer empowerment rather than fighting it will be the ones that thrive in the next decade of insurance.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, check out CoverMy's Future of Insurance page. Your AI is ready. The question is whether the industry is ready for your AI.