Insurtech Insights USA 2026 Concludes, Calling on the Industry to Fix Its Data Foundation As it Integrates AI

Two-Day Conference at the Javits Center Draws 6,000 Industry Leaders as Conversations Shift From AI Pilots to Production

NEW YORK, June 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Insurtech Insights USA 2026 officially concluded today following two days of main stage programming, technology showcases, workshops, and sustained networking at the Javits Center in New York City. The insurance industry’s leading global conference brought together more than 6,000 carriers, MGAs, reinsurers, investors, and technology builders as the industry established that AI’s place in insurance is settled, and explored the readiness of the data infrastructure beneath it.

Across keynotes, panels, and live technology showcases spanning underwriting, claims, distribution, life and health, and specialty commercial lines, messaging consistently surfaced that AI is only as powerful as the data foundation it sits on. As the industry pushes past the efficiency of AI conversation and into accuracy, speed, and competitive differentiation, the organizations pulling ahead are the ones who are doing the strong foundational work.

“Every year this conference gets bigger and the conversations get sharper. That is not a coincidence,” shared Kristoffer Lundberg, CEO of Insurtech Insights. “The people in this room are the ones driving change in insurance globally, and the work they are doing, not just in AI, matters. The staircase has been built. The insurers who move with speed, trust, and the right controls in place are already climbing it. The data foundation has to match the ambition, but trust, whether in the tools or in our insurer relationships, has to match, too.”

The two-day program opened Wednesday, June 3 with the main stage keynote “The AI-Defined Insurer: Rewriting the Rules of Risk, Data, and Competitive Advantage,” featuring Christian Freytag, Group CTO at Allianz , and Mike Ram, Head of Insurance at Anthropic. Freytag opened with three words that set the tone for everything that followed. “Dream big or go home.” Together with Ram, he made the case for where AI in insurance actually stands, what separates the leaders from the laggards, and why the question is no longer if but how fast.

Thursday’s main stage included a morning keynote from Bastiaan de Goei of OpenAI on frontier AI in insurance, a session on AI strategy from Deepa Soni, Chief Information Officer at New York Life, a live fireside with Bolttech CEO Rob Schimek, and a closing keynote from Laura Money, Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer at Sun Life, on scaling innovation without compromising security. Other notable speakers included Dawn Miller, Chief Commercial Officer and CEO of Lloyd’s Americas, whose talk tapped into the future of insurance ecosystems, and Kasey Roh, Head of US at Upstage, and Kristoffer Lunderberg, CEO of Insurtech Insights, whose session on first movers versus smart movers in AI deployment, drew strong responses from the main stage audience.

The session “Data Foundations to Decision Power: Building a Single Source of Truth to Unlock AI’s Impact,” featuring Samrat Dua of Swiss Re Reinsurance, Suraj Tiwari of AXA XL, and Mark Blake of Stibo Systems, placed the data infrastructure question directly at the center of Thursday’s underwriting track. Speakers described mapping AI capabilities across 28 domains and deliberately prioritizing moderate- and lower-risk use cases first, building the delivery track record needed before moving into higher-stakes financial and compliance applications. For organizations still processing legacy documents written more than a decade ago, the message was unambiguous. The architecture is the problem, not the AI. The directive repeated across all six tracks. Before deploying agents, fix your data foundation.

The theme extended well beyond a single session. Speakers across claims, underwriting, and innovation tracks returned to the same root issue. Companies investing in AI without first establishing clean, governed, and accessible data will find the gains they are chasing continue to move further out of reach.

On the Claims Track, the “Claims Without Friction: Delivering Seamless, Empathetic, and Omni-Channel Experiences” panel brought together Pete Piotrowski of Hippo, Richard Wolff of Markel, Michelle Raue of Raue Strategic Advisory, Andy Cohen of Snapsheet, and James Benham of the InsurTech Geek Podcast to examine where claims transformation is actually delivering and where the industry is still stuck. The panel noted that adjusters spend 80 percent of their time as switchboard operators moving data between systems rather than doing claims work. The group agreed the goal is automating that tedium thoroughly enough to return adjusters to old-school claims work, focused on understanding the claim, understanding the claimant, and making the judgment calls only experience can support. As Andy Cohen of Snapsheet put it, the ambition is to make adjusters “superhuman.” The panel also pointed to a morale dividend as an equally important outcome, encouraging attendees that staff doing meaningful analytical work stay longer and deliver better results for customers.

Along the Specialty and Commercial Track, the “Funding the Future of Insurance – Who Will Outpace the Capital Crunch?” panel, moderated by Ali Geramian of Index Risk and featuring Risha Mahadeo-Brown of Arch Insurance Group, Max Aronchick of Guy Carpenter, Mark Elliott of Hagerty, and Matthew Jones of MS Transverse Insurance Group, reflected a capital market operating in a fundamentally different posture than even three years ago. The MGA and insurtech segment has largely completed its shift toward teams with genuine insurance industry experience on board, and reinsurance appetite for the sector has expanded considerably on the heels of roughly $100 billion in industry earnings over the last three years. On the longstanding growth-versus-profitability tension, the panel agreed that founders must focus on underwriting profitability and value accumulation to succeed. As Matthew Jones framed it directly, “if your hunch is that the right thing is to grow at all costs, we should probably get out of insurance.” The group also flagged interest rates as the single variable most likely to reshape capital behavior over the next 18 to 24 months, with ILS and sidecar structures continuing to expand as investors favor flexibility over new balance sheet formations.

The conference closed with the announcement of the Insurtech Impact Award, presented to Quantexa in recognition of demonstrated business value, solution uniqueness, and scope of real-world impact across the insurance sector, along with its connected data intelligence platform and ability to operationalize complex, disparate data at scale. The award is selected through carrier and partner nominations evaluated against four criteria covering business process goal clarity, measurable financial impact, solution uniqueness in the market, and breadth of impact across users and teams. MJP Insurance received an honorable mention for achieving 84 percent efficiency gains compared to market averages.

Insurtech Insights USA will return to the Javits Center in 2027. For more information and post-conference updates, visit insurtechinsights.com/america.

About Insurtech Insights
Insurtech Insights is one of the world’s leading insurance technology communities, connecting insurance executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and technology leaders through global conferences, networking, and thought leadership opportunities. Its events bring together industry decision-makers and innovators to explore the future of insurance and the technologies transforming the sector. Learn more at insurtechinsights.com.

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