Futurescapes 2026

Ten trends. In nearly all of them, somebody decided not to wait.

Once a year we read VML's Future 100 with an insurance brain switched on and write about the trends that made us sit up. This year: bunkers marketed as insurance, humanoids on real factory floors, employees who aren't people, AI agents that buy things on your behalf, a biological age you can buy on the high street, and public money funding research into cooling the planet. None of them asked an insurer first.

Get the report

Inside the report

Ten trends, each given the same six things.

A one-liner that tells you what the trend is. What's going on, with the examples that convinced us. The reasons to believe, with page numbers so you can check the working. What it means for insurance.

Then three insurance ideas per trend, each with who it's for, how it works and the hard part: one line on why nobody has built it yet. And three lines of advice for insurers: something to check in your wordings now, something to test within twelve months, and something to watch, with the trigger that says it's time to move.

Insurance Futurescapes 2026 report cover

The trends

Ten trends, one common thread.

Some are probably already on your radar. Others may be a decade out. Nearly all of them describe people building resilience privately, and the question underneath is whether they end up building it with us or without us.

01 Apocalypse planning

The very wealthy are buying bunkers, and they've started calling them insurance.

02 Working with humanoids

Humanoid robots are arriving on real factory floors, and our injury data assumes everybody there is human.

03 The synthetic workforce

Companies are hiring things that aren't people, and our entire architecture assumes an insured is a person or a company.

04 The robot customer

AI assistants have started buying things, which raises the awkward question of who gave them permission.

05 Your real age

You can now buy a biological age in five minutes on the high street, which is a rival to the number we price on.

06 Three days in the dark

People are paying to spend days in total darkness, and one operator is quietly building the resilience dataset we should own.

07 New senses

Scientists are giving people senses humans have never had, which will make a mess of every disability definition we've written.

08 Designer beginnings

Reproductive science is moving faster than the rulebook, and every genetic underwriting rule we have was written for adults.

09 The invincible founder

Businesses are training AI on their founders, which makes the most valuable asset they own a model nobody has insured.

10 Turning down the sun

Governments are funding deliberate climate intervention, and it is a liability class with no loss history at all.

What to do with all of this

Three piles, not ten recommendations.

Check the wording: cheap, quick, and usually the most valuable thing in a report like this. Half of these trends don't need a new product, they need somebody to notice that a definition written in 1998 has quietly stopped describing the world.

Run a test: a handful are ready for something small and real inside twelve months. Pick one, not three. Hold a brief: the rest are too early, but too early isn't the same as ignore. A brief means a named person, a page of notes, and a trigger.

Get Futurescapes

Futurescapes 2026. Free.

Thanks — Futurescapes is on its way to your inbox.

Work with us

Three questions worth arguing about.

Which of these made somebody uncomfortable? That's the signal; comfortable trends are ones you've already priced. What are our customers doing privately that they haven't told us about? And who owns the first pile, the one that isn't innovation and isn't business as usual?

Half our work starts with a conversation like that one. If any of these landed, or if you think we've got one badly wrong, we'd like to hear about it.

Start a conversation