The future of insurance broking is knocking at your door
Michael McQueen landed at the NZbrokers Conference in Christchurch this week with insights that had member brokers rethinking their approach to technology and client engagement.
His recent LinkedIn article outlines five critical trends reshaping insurance – trends we’re seeing play out in real-time with our JAVLN partners.
McQueen’s framework cuts through the noise: think in tides, not waves. While vendors push the latest shiny tech, the real transformation runs deeper. As he explained, waves are “loud and exciting” but temporary, while tides are “silent” and “slow in moving” but “reshape the entire coastline.”
As a good example, McQueen demonstrated NotebookLM turning the Privacy Amendment Act 2025 into a digestible podcast, complete with two AI hosts discussing the legislation. This tool can create mind maps, study guides, and even interactive Q&A sessions. That’s practical innovation that turns complex information into easy to understand bite size chunks.
McQueen shared the sobering story of a Hong Kong finance employee who transferred $25 million after a video call where “every person who had been on that video call was in fact a deep fake.” As he noted, this makes “face to face… actually gonna matter more than ever.”. The point being, the more AI we have in our world, the more important in-person real human connection and relationships will be.
“They love their phones… but there’s something they don’t tend to like doing on their phones, and that is answering them,” McQueen observed.
Gen Z clients “won’t answer” and “don’t check voicemail either.” Their average TikTok usage? Over 2 hours daily.
McQueen’s insight about habitual thinking being “the number one enemy of innovation” (quoting Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard) hit home. His driving exercise proved the point – asking people to describe step-by-step how they get in their car and drive to the end of their street. He revealed nine steps most people do but forgot to mention, including checking mirrors, putting on seatbelts, and indicating.
“That is something you do so often, so unconsciously on autopilot. When I ask you to make it conscious or explicit… it’s actually really quite hard to do,” McQueen explained. “We do the same things so often the same way, we become oblivious to the stuff we’re doing that actually doesn’t even make sense anymore.”
His advice? Get fresh eyes on your business. Ask new clients four months in: “What do we do that from your standpoint just seems a bit odd? Or didn’t make sense to you, or maybe made you feel a bit dumb?” Or bring in a trusted member to ask “all the dumb questions.”
“Best practice doesn’t stay best practice for very long right now,” McQueen warned. “The moment you think you’ve made it, you’ve passed it.”
“The electric light didn’t come from the continuous improvement of candles,” McQueen quoted from Oren Harari.
He emphasised that “evolutionary change is not gonna be enough” and recommended Charlene Li’s “The Disruption Mindset” for those wanting to understand how to “prioritise the needs of your future customers over your current ones.”
McQueen’s colleague from Sydney University compared AI to “teenage sex” – “everyone’s talking about it, not very many are actually really doing it, no-one’s doing it very well, and there’s a whole bunch of safety issues involved.”
He highlighted practical AI applications, noting the top uses now include soft skill development and coaching. His suggested prompt: “From what you know of me, what are my top three professional blind spots?”
McQueen’s closing wisdom: “Resisting change is a little bit like trying to hold your breath. Even if you are successful, it’s not going to end well.”
The insurance playbook is being rewritten. At JAVLN, we’re creating the infrastructure for brokers who choose to lead this transformation. Our Platform streamlines policy and financial management. JAVLN Officetech ensures compliance with immutable audit trails.
