What's happening
A wave of new commentary pushes back on the AI hype cycle: executives at Aon, Neptune and Crosstie are all making the case that scattered AI features don't add up to a strategy, and that the real work is fixing workflows and augmenting agents rather than replacing them. Meanwhile M&A stayed brisk in a different vein, with Mapfre taking a stake in Spanish insurtech Tuio, Genki buying claims-AI startup Wave Claims, and Third Wave rolling up five Gulf Coast agencies. Marsh also surfaced twice, brokering risk for large AI data center builds tied to Meta and a $14 billion El Paso project, and Lockton launched a practice specifically for that data-center infrastructure niche.
Why it matters
The pushback on AI hype signals the conversation is maturing past pilots and demos toward whether these tools actually change day-to-day claims and underwriting work, which is a harder bar to clear. At the same time, brokers positioning around AI data-center risk shows the industry treating AI infrastructure itself as a new insurable asset class, not just a tool for insurers to use internally, and that's a market worth watching for further broker and carrier entries.