Is Your Expertise Losing Its Value? How to Future-Proof Your Career
Most people don't find out their expertise has stopped being hard to find until they're in a salary review, wondering why the number hasn't moved. By then, it's been true for a while. Around 75% of UK financial services firms are now using AI, and the biggest take-up is among insurers and international banks (Treasury Committee, 2026). Somewhere in all that, firms are working out which parts of your job they still need to pay a premium for.
That calculation is going on in claims teams and advice firms right now, and it doesn't announce itself. Trying to future-proof your career has very little to do with predicting which job titles survive, because nobody manages that reliably. What matters more is noticing early, while you still have room to move, that the market has started treating your particular depth as a standard feature rather than a reason to pay more.
The signals show up before the payslip does
The first sign tends to be in the wording of job adverts rather than in anything happening at your own desk. When roles in your specialism start naming a platform where they used to name a competency, the employer has decided the system carries the knowledge and the person operates the system. That's a different job, priced differently, even when the title stays the same.
It's worth watching the grade as well, because work that used to come to you starts landing with someone two rungs down and nobody calls it a demotion, since the software has made it routine. Salary bands in your specialism go flat while a neighbouring specialism moves. Interviews start asking how many cases you close in a week rather than how you handled the difficult one. None of it is dramatic on its own, and that's the problem, because it just looks like a slow, quiet year.
What automation is actually taking
If the question in your head is whether AI will replace your job, the more useful version of it is which parts of your job have already been repriced. Adoption across the economy is broad but thin, which is worth knowing before anybody panics. The ONS found self-reported AI use in UK businesses with ten or more employees has risen "from around 12% to around 35% since late 2023", while the average number of AI technologies used per adopting business went up only "from around 1.4 to around 1.6" (ONS, 2026). Firms are buying one or two things that work rather than rebuilding around the technology.
The ONS also reports that most businesses have seen no change in overall headcount so far, with the clearest effects landing on administrative and clerical roles (ONS, 2026). AI in insurance claims has arrived first at triage, document reading and low-value settlements. Automation in financial services has moved fastest through fact-finds, cashflow modelling, and the first draft of a suitability report, which is a fair description of how many paraplanners spend the week.
There's a regulatory version of the same shift that doesn't depend on any firm buying technology. Since 6 April 2026, firms have been able to use targeted support, which "allows firms to offer suggestions to groups of customers with common characteristics" (FCA, 2026), without any of it counting as personal advice. Work that used to require a qualified individual for every client can now reach an entire segment at once. That doesn't remove the need for advisers, but it does move a slice of the job out of the priced-per-person category.
Where the value moves next
The work that keeps its value is the work that gets handed to a person because the software can't finish it. Complex and disputed claims, contested liability, clients whose circumstances don't fit the model, anything where somebody has to take a defensible view and stand behind it. Moving toward that end of your field is a repositioning most people can start without changing employer or beginning again.
The other route is to become the person who oversees the technology, and fewer people are going for that than you might expect. Somebody has to check what the system has produced, answer for it when it gets something wrong, and explain the whole thing to a regulator. The government's plan for the sector says it "needs people at all levels with AI-related skills, not just engineers and data scientists, but also leaders, risk managers, legal experts, and frontline employees" (GOV.UK, 2026). Somebody has to check what the model produced, own the outcome when it's wrong and explain it to a regulator. If you know the underlying work properly, you're better placed to do that than someone who only knows the software.
Timing the move
Most attempts to future-proof your career come unstuck on timing rather than on judgment, because the instinct is to wait until the situation is undeniable. By that point your specialism is common, everyone in it is looking at the same time, and you're negotiating from a position the market has already discounted. Commoditised expertise doesn't stop being useful; it stops being rare, and rare is the bit you were being paid for.
Move while your experience still reads as an advantage rather than a legacy. That might be a sideways step into a firm handling more complex work, a qualification that opens up the escalation end of your specialism, or a role where the technology is in place but nobody senior really understands it yet. All of those are easier to arrange from a job you're doing well than from a redundancy consultation.
Nobody sends a warning when your expertise gets repriced, so the only real protection is watching the market while you still have options. The people who future-proof their career aren't usually the ones who saw the technology coming. They're the ones who noticed what their own work was quietly turning into, and moved before it finished.
If you're working in claims, insurance, or financial services and you're not sure your experience is still valued the way it used to be, we're always happy to have a confidential, no-pressure chat about what's out there.
Take a look at the latest roles at exchange-street.co.uk or call us on 0161 973 6900.