Speaking at the industry event today, Thurbon urged brokers and insurers to take a measured approach to AI adoption, focusing on how the technology can deliver durable, customer-centric value rather than chasing short-term hype or speculative investments.
“I think we should be backing investments that make the most durable and value-related difference to customers,” Thurbon said. “Those that bring innovative approaches to solving their problems in new ways — or allowing us to solve them more efficiently.”
Thurbon warned that while the AI sector appears “invincible” in its current growth phase, there are structural risks in the sustainability of the technology’s underlying infrastructure – and that there is an enormous reckoning coming.
“There’s enormous revenue coming from AI-level investment,” he noted. “But I have concerns from a sustainability perspective – the infrastructure being invested in across the AI space isn’t necessarily durable or affordable. The data centres, for instance, will be rendered obsolete at some point.”
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He added that while early investors in companies such as NVIDIA have enjoyed massive returns, predicting the next big winner is impossible. What matters more, he said, is how businesses apply AI – not just where they invest.
From the broker’s perspective, QBE’s CEO Sue Houghton described AI as a promising but “formative technology” that remains in the early stages of adoption.
“We all got really excited – thinking we’d better start using AI for everything and that we’d all lose our jobs in two years,” she said. “But if you step back, it’s about what you’re trying to achieve strategically and what you’re doing for the customer. AI is another tool we can start to use.”
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She said that while many firms are still exploring practical use cases, the potential benefits are clear – from improving decision-making and risk assessment to creating operational efficiencies.
“It will help us make better decisions, think about the risks our customers are facing, and eventually deliver efficiencies,” Houghton said. “We’re just not quite there yet.”
Drawing on his decades in the tech industry, Chris Mackinnon the current Regional Director for Lloyd's compared today’s enthusiasm around AI to the arrival of personal computers more than 30 years ago.
“Everybody was convinced it was the end of the world – that we’d all be out of jobs,” he recalled. “All it did was make us do more work. The expectations on productivity increased because of the technology, rather than replacing us.”
Mackinnon believes AI will follow a similar path – expanding human productivity rather than erasing it.
“It’ll just mean we’re doing more work – but less of the repetitive work that can be automated,” he said.
