Insurance spent centuries pricing the past. The future belongs to those who can price the present.
— Jim Carroll
Original 2021 statement: Insurance is moving from looking at the past performance of something to looking at real-time indicators from that thing
What Jim has written about this
From “The Trends Scorecard: Insurance - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened” (July 2026)
The grade: Hit. This is usage-based insurance, and it is now mainstream — Progressive Snapshot, Root, Tesla’s own embedded telematics policies, and a long list of others price drivers on real-time behavior. The “GPS enabled performance measuring device” I described turned out to be the smartphone in your pocket and the chip already built into the car. Called it.
By 2023, with AI accelerating everything, I distilled the entire decade-plus of these predictions into a single line about the deepest shift in the business: we’re moving from a world in which insurance risk is assessed by actuaries looking back in time, to one that involves real-time or forward-oriented predictive risk analysis. That’s a substantial, significant change, and AI helps to take us there.
Here’s where I keep myself honest. For all the talk of real-time, forward-looking, instance-oriented insurance, the uncomfortable truth in 2026 is that the bedrock of the business is still the annual, backward-priced policy — and meanwhile the thing I warned about earliest, the changing nature of risk itself, has outrun the industry’s ability to price it. I said it plainly in 2025: The fact is, the insurance industry finds itself at a pivotal moment where traditional models are colliding with accelerating risk. The very foundations of insurability are being challenged by climate, technology, and societal shifts.
From “Daily Inspiration: “It’s time to move from triage to tomorrow!”” (January 2023)
Real-time analytical predictive insurance underwriting will be the only actuarial insurance model in the not-too-distant future
Read the full pieces on jimcarroll.com:
The Trends Scorecard: Insurance - What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
Daily Inspiration: “It’s time to move from triage to tomorrow!”