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Hello.

Well, that was a welcome home from Vegas.

An overnight flight straight into a hilly Quantocks half marathon. A tough morning’s work. Then a weekend of solo parenting. Even tougher work!

But we’re back. And it’s been a crazy but beautiful couple of weeks.

Budget planning on the Sønr side, and time with clients old and new budget planning their side too. Mostly making sure there’s a line in 2027 for market intelligence. Preferably one with Sønr written next to it.

2027 is looking like an absolute belter for us, with some properly good conversations about getting Sønr 2.0 out to the rest of the world. More on that below.

Now to SøNws. Well, nearly.

Did anyone else wake up to videos of the Tesla Roadster [scroll to 12mins] driving up a curved ramp, flipping in the air and using rocket tech to land safely?

AI? Not AI? I sometimes feel like I’m living in a sci-fi movie.

Also, and maybe a more relatable topic, I just read that Google and Anthropic are paying SpaceX a combined $2.17bn a month for AI compute. That’s about $26bn a year, against SpaceX’s entire 2025 revenue of $18.7bn 🤯

Never bet against Elon. So they say. 

Right, let’s get into it.

Agents get a rulebook

Last edition I wrote about AI agents turning up at the front door. Some insurers locked them out. Some held the door wide open.

Well, it looks like Sigo Seguros, a Texas auto agency, has built them their own entrance. 

Its new MCP server lets agents quote and buy cover inside ChatGPT and Grok, with Muse waiting on Meta’s approval.

It has also launched InsuranceMCP.com, an open directory for other insurers to list theirs.

Then the rules started arriving.

Sierra launched a Personal Agent Protocol with Meta on 6 October. Poppy, for short.

It’s a draft open standard for how your AI agent finds a business, signs in for you and what it’s allowed to do once inside.

Three days later, 35 more design partners joined. GEICO, Liberty Mutual and Cigna are among them. So is Insurify… just a fortnight after blocking Muse.

And it’s not just buying. 

Coverdash has launched a Claude connector, so its small business policyholders can pull certificates of insurance, ask coverage questions and request policy changes without leaving the chat.

Interestingly, some agents are also jumping on the phone for their humans.

Guardian Life’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Steve Rullo, told Insurance Business that healthcare providers are using AI to call Guardian and check patients’ benefits.

Another nice move is Cover Genius launching protection AI agents can offer inside a chat, from flight delays to purchase protection.

Its own research found 78% of consumers are open to an agent buying for them, but fewer than 7% want it buying paid protection on its own.

And if your agent buys the wrong thing? Sure has partnered with Agentcard, which lets AI agents pay with your cards, to refund eligible mistakes. Up to $250 a purchase and $1,000 a year.

What a world we’re stepping into.

If you want to keep better track of this space, drop me a line. I’ll happily connect you with Emily Peters, our Director of Research, whose team helps clients all around the world stay on top of it.

Who insures the agent?

What I love about emerging tech, and AI in particular, is just how many different plays are afoot.

One this week is from Harbor.

It’s just come out of stealth with a $10m seed. It finds every AI agent a company runs, scores the risk, blocks decisions that break the company’s own rules, then insures what’s left. It hasn’t said who’s providing the capacity.

Excluding AI, on the other hand, isn’t catching on.

At the CIAB forum in Colorado Springs, the view was that it’s mostly smaller carriers using ISO’s optional AI exclusions.

Zurich US CEO Alex Wells said Zurich treats AI as an underwriting question, not a contract one.

EPIC’s Marc Kunney put it simply: it’s really hard to exclude AI when nearly every business uses it. A great line.

Related, AXA’s Future Risks Report, out this week, has AI top of the experts’ list for the first time, ahead of climate change. Only 9% of the experts worried about it think public authorities are ready. In Europe, it’s 3%.

When it rains, it pays

Airbnb has launched weather protection, underwritten by Chubb.

Guests from ten European countries can add it at checkout, and if rain at the listing hits the policy’s daily threshold, they get between €50 and €1,000 for that day. No claim, no photos, no forms. I could do with this next week. 

Another parametric, same idea, much bigger scale: Liberty Mutual Re has paid out on Mexico’s national parametric earthquake cover after July’s magnitude 7.3 quake, triggered by Safehub’s ground sensors near the epicentre.

And Generali has agreed to work with the World Bank Group on insurance in emerging markets, starting in Asia with cover for ageing populations, crops and disasters, plus pooling disaster risk across regions. No figures or targets yet, but I’m loving this one.

And meanwhile…

A quick round-up of the ones I couldn’t find a natural home for.

FWD is buying 25% of bolttech Insurance in Hong Kong for $20.72m, taking it back into general insurance. Loving this for bolttech.

Lloyd’s has made a strategic investment in Asterias, a Lloyd’s Lab alum building shared data infrastructure for aviation insurance and leasing. InsurTech Gateway backed it early. Nice one, teams.

Meanwhile, Meanwhile has raised $37.5m, led by Bain Capital Crypto, for life insurance paid in Bitcoin. Yup, Bitcoin. Pay one Bitcoin premium, and your family gets a Bitcoin death benefit.

Checking the AI’s homework

Manulife has launched an enterprise AI platform. Or a central hub of sorts.

One place to build, approve and reuse AI tools across its markets. It’s aiming for $1bn of cumulative AI value by 2027, with $300m banked by the end of 2025 (both Manulife’s own numbers).

Ironically their website is currently down so I wasn’t able to get a decent screenshot. This’ll have to do!

ERGO NEXT has swapped a 5 to 10 day wait for a field inspector with a 15-minute self-inspection, guided by vision AI. Simple but nice.

Hippo says its AI claims agent, Clara, now handles 81% of first claim calls without a human (again, Hippo’s own figure), and its calls are reviewed the same way as a human adjuster’s.

“Customers shouldn’t be getting different results based on whether it’s AI or a human,” says Kyle Ramsay, Chief Product and AI Officer.

And whilst it’s great sharing all this innovation, it’s important to remember most aren’t there yet.

In a new SAS and IDC study of 2,699 decision-makers, nearly 80% said their organisations override more than 10% of what their AI agents decide. The most common reason is that the AI didn’t explain itself. Which leads nicely on to Sønr 2.0…

What’s next for Sønr

Sønr 2.0 is still in beta. Just. But it’s built so you don’t have to check its homework, and the intelligence coming out of it, and the value of that intelligence, is properly strong now. 

Better still, we move from beta to launch in the coming weeks.

We’re also working on a couple of roadmap ideas. And this is where you come in.

The first is Pulse, which builds intelligence from activity across the platform itself. What’s happening globally, how relevant the trends you follow are, how the market’s responding, and what people in roles like yours are looking at. A good way to get to know what you don’t know.

The second is for all the analyst and research reports that have done their job and are now sitting in a folder somewhere.

The idea is a marketplace called Exchange: upload them, they go through an anonymisation engine, and you earn credits to access other people’s reports without paying for them.

If either sounds useful, drop me a note. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on how we might evolve the thinking.

Apparently you’re listening

We did some analysis on the Unfiltered pod.

Still early days, but we’re cruising past 650 downloads, with September up 162% on August (helped along by our first guest, Bill Harris 🙏).

Two to catch up on:

1. Insurance at Day Zero is our first in-person guest episode, with Arslan Hannani, Chief Innovation Officer at Aviva. Personal agents, Aviva’s work inside ChatGPT, and why insurance may need to go headless (no front end of its own, just plugged into wherever the customer already is).

2. When Your AI Starts Buying Insurance is out this week. The ITC Vegas debrief, Corgi, Lemonade and Tesla, Blackstone selling Clarion, finfluencers and Chinese cars.

The big question though, what are you’re thoughts on the potential new branding?!

Listen / Apple / Spotify

Next week, it’s Jay Weintraub, co-founder and CEO of Connectiv, the team behind the upcoming Protectors Vegas. 

Sønr is an official partner, and Nige and I will both be there (9 to 11 November, The Venetian), recording Unfiltered and doing plenty of meeting and greeting.

If you’re over there, give us a shout.
Our Friends of Sønr VIP link gets you at least $200 off.

Talking of Vegas, I’ve got to jump. ITC Vegas advisory board call calling.

Next week I’m running a 50 miler, around (well, halfway around!) Menorca. Not an official race per se. Just something I’ve wanted to do since we’ve been going on holiday there.

I’ll be out the office but the team will be on hand.

For now, have great weekends.

And as always, thanks for reading, and please share this with any colleagues or friends who might be interested.

Until next time. Big love.

Matt

 The world is changing faster than insurance. Sønr exists to close that gap.

 Trusted by the world’s leading (re)insurers, brokers and innovators in over 60 countries to track what’s emerging, validate the opportunities worth backing, and act on it.