New York’s insurance world doesn’t usually gather to talk. It gathers to trade — flow for capacity, capacity for flow. So when Zywave opened its Horizon: Digital Distribution Conference by promising something different — a room built for conversation instead of what Zywave’s own Jeff Cohen called “speed dating” — it read less like a welcome and more like a quiet challenge. What followed was six hours of senior brokers, carrier CEOs, and MGA leaders digging into the real issues of the day: what’s actually working, what isn’t, and how an entire ecosystem is trying to optimize for the kind of organic, profitable growth that no amount of networking alone can produce.
AI was, predictably, the word of the day. But the more interesting story that emerged from the keynote, the fireside chats, and the panels wasn’t really about the technology. It was about people, discipline, and the slow, structural work of deciding what kind of company you actually want to be.
Here are several threads that ran through the day’s conversations:
The Talent Reckoning Is Already Underway, and the Old Playbook Doesn’t Work
Keynote speaker Tom Gillingham, President of Commercial Risk at NFP and incoming CEO of Totalis Specialty Group, opened the day with a sobering number: roughly 400,000 insurance professionals are projected to have retired since 2021. What Gillingham refused to let the room treat as simple demographic bad luck was the second half of the story — the cost of fighting over the people who haven’t left yet.
Brown & Brown has been disclosing, quarter over quarter, the price of a lateral-hiring war that has swept up five of the largest brokerages in the country into lawsuits over non-competes and broker-of-record letters, putting the damage at roughly $23 million in lost revenue by January and a projected $50 to $60 million for the year. “We are collectively spending real dollars defending market share,” Gillingham said, “in a zero-sum fight for experienced talent instead of spending those same dollars growing the supply of the talent.”
The afternoon’s “Power of Savvy Sellers” panel picked up the same thread from ground level, and its answers were refreshingly unglamorous. Howard Weiss, Chief Growth Officer at King Risk Partners, described a recent hiring class: of eleven recent hires, only four came from inside insurance. One came from logistics, one from agriculture, and one, to the visible delight of the panel, from behind a bar. “What does your favorite bartender do? They’re building a relationship. They’re serving a need. They remember your name,” Weiss said, betting that the instincts that make someone good at a crowded Friday-night shift translate directly into producing. Bobbie Collies, Chief Growth Officer at Novacore, shared a conscious bias toward athletes who played high school or college sports, prizing the resilience of recovering from a loss quickly over any résumé line about insurance experience.
The Specialist Premium Is Now Too Large to Ignore
Gillingham’s most data-heavy stretch of the keynote was also his most pointed. The U.S. excess and surplus lines market crossed $100 billion in premium for the first time; the MGA market hit roughly $128 billion, up double digits for a fifth consecutive year; and Ryan Specialty just closed its fifteenth straight year of double-digit organic growth, spanning three full underwriting cycles. Set against that, the public broker scorecard for early 2026 — Aon at 5% organic growth, Gallagher at 5%, Marsh at 4%, Brown & Brown flat — makes an uncomfortable case. “The gap between the specialist and the generalist isn’t closing,” Gillingham said. “It’s the defining performance spread in the industry right now.”
Gillingham drove home the point, using his own company as an example. Less than a year and a half after Aon’s $13 billion acquisition of NFP, Aon sold the majority of NFP’s wealth business back to its original private-equity sponsor for roughly $2.7 billion — not because the business was bad, Gillingham argued, but because it was never the reason the deal made sense. Compare that discipline to Ryan Specialty’s, which has spent fifteen years declining “100 easier, broader growth opportunities” to stay inside delegated authority and specialty distribution. Two very different companies, one underlying trait: a stubborn, almost boring clarity about what the business actually is, and the willingness to shed anything — however profitable — that dilutes it.
The Broker Seat Survives, But the Job Doesn’t Stay the Same
If any session was built to settle nerves rather than raise them, it was Justin Regenwether’s. As Zywave’s Chief Customer Officer, Regenwether opened by naming the question he said everyone in the room had already fielded from a board member, a producer, or “maybe even your own kids”: is AI going to take my job? His answer, backed by a third-party market study rather than “a subjective opinion piece,” was a flat no — and his reasoning doubled as a compact theory of why the channel exists at all. “Insurance has to be sold. It is very rarely bought,” he said, and the durable skill in that sale isn’t filling out forms, it’s reading the gap between what a client says they need and what they’re actually exposed to. “We like to call this uncovering the hidden context,” he said, “and that’s the thing AI can actually amplify, rather than replace.”
The “Transformative Power of Agentic AI” panel that ran in the afternoon reinforced some of Regenwether’s points, albeit from the MGA side of the fence. Rich Fusinski, Corporate SVP, Chief Information Officer, H.W. Kaufman Group, described effectively 10x-ing his own output with agentic tools since the start of the year — and, in the same breath, explained why he still won’t let AI make architecture decisions unsupervised. “It may make 10 or 50 or 100 bad design or architecture decisions a day, the same way a person would,” he said. “You still need a human in the loop with the AI you’re supervising, just like you do with the people you supervise.”
Growth Is a Culture, Not a Campaign
During the “Power of Savvy Sellers” panel, Gabby Lamb, Chief Growth Officer at the Hilb Group, reframed organic growth not as a sales initiative but as an operating system: “Are my account managers thinking about account expansion? Are they thinking about whether this customer, because of the great service I’m providing, will refer me to their friends and family?” In a soft market where rate is shrinking and policies-in-force are wobbling, several panelists said they’d quietly stopped watching the metrics everyone assumes matter and started watching one that doesn’t lie: raw customer count, up or down, day over day.
The panel also converged on the notion of language, suggesting stripping the word “sales” out of conversations with their service teams — not to obscure what was happening, but because service employees, as one panelist put it, “view themselves like nurses. They’re there to take care of people.” Reframe an upsell as making sure a client’s coverage limit is actually enough if they get into an accident, and the conversation changes entirely. Cross-selling across a commercial-and-benefits book carries its own friction, since it means asking a producer to risk a relationship built one interaction at a time — what Zywave’s Connie Johnston, the panel’s moderator, called “marble jar moments,” borrowing from author Brené Brown.
Insurance Is Learning to Meet Customers Where They Already Are
The day’s most vivid case study came not from the keynote but from a fireside chat between Zywave’s Harsh Paleja and Bryan Davis, President & CEO, VIU by HUB, HUB International, on embedded distribution. Davis, a 20-year carrier veteran turned broker-side technologist, opened with a customer survey that should worry anyone still building a growth strategy around outbound calls: 56% of policyholders said they hadn’t heard from anyone about their coverage in over a year, and 21% couldn’t name their own agent or carrier. His explanation was blunt. “Customers are busy with their hearts,” he said. “They really don’t want to deal with the head. Head purchases are things like insurance.”
That distinction — hearts versus heads — is doing more work in the industry than most strategy decks acknowledge. Ninety-five percent of VIU’s revenue now comes from embedded, strategic partnerships across 200-plus relationships in six verticals, from credit unions to mortgage servicing platforms, where insurance shows up inside a transaction the customer was already making.
Davis went further, describing an experiment where VIU proactively reshopped 3,000 policyholders’ renewal pricing, something carriers reflexively fear as an invitation to churn. Less than 1% actually switched providers. Given the chance to advise rather than simply transact, Davis argued, the broker earns something more durable than a single sale: the customer’s loyalty shifts to the advisor, not necessarily to a carrier.
Trust, Not Just Technology, Is the New Currency
The day’s closing “View from the Top” panel surfaced a theme that had been quietly running underneath everything else: proprietary data, and who gets to trust whom with it, may matter more over the next decade than any single piece of software. Dean Hildebrandt, President of Assurex Global, offered the day’s most counterintuitive line on the subject. Operating across 107 countries, he argued that rigid data standards have become almost beside the point. “Standards don’t matter anymore. Language doesn’t matter,” he said, “as long as you have a standard and bring it in and apply it to that standard, you’re good” — a reminder that the real bottleneck in distribution has shifted from formatting data to trusting and using it well.
That undercurrent of trust extended into the newer risks the panel saw coming. Michael Price, CEO of Dellwood Insurance Group, warned that “AI is the next cyber” — an emerging exposure that regulators and underwriters are still behind on, much as the industry once was with early cyber coverage. The message running underneath both comments was consistent: the industry’s appetite for new capability, whatever form it takes, is outrunning its governance for it, and the firms that close that gap responsibly — rather than fastest — are the ones likely to still be standing when the exposure catches up with everyone else.
Up Next – Join Us October 29 for Zywave Horizon: Cyber Risk New York
If you missed the thought-provoking conversation at Zywave Horizon: Digital Distribution, the dialogue will continue at the upcoming Zywave Horizon: Cyber Risk Conference in New York City on Oct. 29, 2026. This hallmark event for cyber risk professionals and insurance buyers is known for its stellar content, expert speakers, and opportunities to connect. This day of learning and networking draws attendees from throughout the global cyber ecosystem and offers the most up-to-the minute insights on cyber threats, regulatory and legal trends, insurance market conditions, and risk quantification. Register now!
