Is Insurance Still a Good Career Choice in the Age of AI?

I did not set out to work in insurance. Yet here I am, many years later, no longer a broker but now an educator, seeing the industry from a new perspective.

Today's challenges and opportunities look very different from those I faced when I started.

Back then, I battled mountains of paper and slow processes that frustrated me and my customers. Today, the industry wrestles with new challenges: the rise of AI and the rapid growth of InsurTechs, which are eager to disrupt the incumbents.

So, in an AI-driven world, is insurance still a good career choice?

Humans or technology?

Insurance can offer a fulfilling career. But AI forces us to ask: will it remain a people-driven industry, or will it follow others in becoming heavily reliant on technology?

The human/technology question is not just about whether AI will replace staff. The real question is whether the industry can evolve with technology, using it to improve customer service and efficiency, while proving that human judgment, empathy, and creativity still matter.

Adaptability is the new stability

Insurance is far more than sales targets and paperwork. It spans analytics, compliance, claims, investment, and advisory work. AI will certainly handle repetitive processing. But that opens the door for new roles in data interpretation, technology oversight, and customer engagement where empathy matters most.

Lifelong learning is now essential. Companies are investing in traditional skills, underwriting, risk assessment, negotiation, and new skills in AI. Underwriters will spend less time crunching data and more time exercising judgment. Actuaries and claims specialists will use their expertise and technology to innovate.

The winners will be those who adapt fastest.

Closing the talent gap

As experienced professionals retire, demand for new talent grows. AI can process information in seconds, but cannot walk a customer through a complex claim with patience and empathy or weigh competing risks with context and care, and these are not skills you can learn overnight.

The future belongs not to those who fear AI but to those who use it to supplement those human skills it cannot replicate (yet).

The perception problem

Here lies the real challenge. Too many still see insurance as dull, outdated, and irrelevant in a tech-obsessed world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Insurance is changing faster today than ever in its long history.

If potential new entrants rush to other careers, the responsibility falls on those in the industry to show that insurance is not a career of the past but one of the future, reshaped by technology and human creativity working together.

A personal reflection

Many of us stumbled into insurance rather than planned for it. Yet we stayed because it offered more than we expected. AI will not change that truth. But it does change how we tell our story to the next generation.

Insurance surprised me. It gave me opportunities I never imagined. The real question is whether future potential industry entrants will even see those opportunities, or whether they will drift elsewhere.

For those of you already in the industry: what wisdom would you share with someone considering insurance as a career today?