AI Feelings

There’s no question AI-enabled technology tools are helping agencies become more efficient. From chatbots to advanced data analytics and coverage comparisons, AI is making huge advances in efficiency for the insurance industry.

“It’s sort of funny. If you asked me a year ago, maybe two years ago, ‘What am I thinking about AI?’ I would say I’m sort of ignoring it, hands over the eyes and the ears and the mouth,” Matt Masiello, CEO of SIAA, told Insurance Journal. “Now we’re implementing business intelligence and AI.”

Even so, there seems to be a growing negative sentiment throughout the insurance industry, more notably at the carrier level.

A new report, Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index, highlights insurance industry employees’ growing negativity toward AI job displacement, as sector employment dropped 21% year-over-year and entry-level adjuster positions dropped 50% YoY.

Glassdoor noted that for its broader AI Report, confidence hit a record 10-year low in July, and a large percentage came from the insurance sector.

From July 2025 to July 2026, employee confidence in insurance dropped 7 percentage points, noted authors Chris Martin, senior economist with Glassdoors Economic Research team, and Indeed Hiring Lab economist Feliz Aidala.

The extremely negative sentiment toward AI is driven by fears of AI-based job replacement, the push to use AI tools, and AI degrading work or product quality.

From late 2023 to early 2024, overall insurance industry employee confidence dropped significantly (in line with a broader decline in employee confidence) but rebounded until May of 2026.

With the industry’s confidence at an all-time low, claims adjusters were found to be the most critical of AI (98%) in Glassdoor reviews. This is telling, since the industry’s confidence had been tracking higher than other industries historically.

Postings for claims adjusters are down 55% from their post-pandemic peak, the report showed, compared to a 36% decline in the broader labor market.

The study found that:

• Claim adjusters represented 18% of jobs lost but comprised only 2% of the industry.
• Insurance carriers shed nearly 75,000 jobs YoY.
• Demand for inexperienced workers has collapsed, with entry-level adjuster job postings down 50% since 2025, data showed.
• Inexperienced claims adjusters often follow specific formulas that can be outsourced to agentic AI, the report authors noted.
• Senior-level job postings remain about 80% above 2017 levels.
• Overall, Glassdoor reported that AI sentiment across all jobs/industries was 53% negative.

The authors indicate that while there could be other factors at play, insurance industry employees are putting the blame squarely on AI–a sentiment that might not be far off given that Indeed’s GenAI Skill Transformation Index identified insurance roles as facing high levels of skill replacement, with 70% of skills identified as poised for hybrid transformation with AI leading and a human overseeing.

Now is the time to think about how insurance agency jobs will retain that human-in-the-loop oversight.

Topics InsurTech Data Driven Artificial Intelligence