The Future of Insurance – Ensuring Trust at a Time of Mistrust (Live from ACORD CONNECT 2026)

Episode Detail

Three voices, one shared problem: the insurance industry calls itself data-driven, but trusts almost none of the data it runs on. This episode is a live panel recorded at ACORD Connect 2026, where Bryan sat down with Russell Sommers of Baker Tilly, Meredith Barnes-Cook of Datos Insights, and Spero Zacharias of Chubb to talk about what happens to that trust problem once AI starts doing the interpreting.

The conversation moves through where AI genuinely closes the industry's biggest data gaps and where it just introduces a new category of things to verify, why the fixed-field data governance models built for a different era might not survive an AI-driven one, who actually owns a piece of data when something goes wrong, and how far state regulation and industry standards like ACORD's can go toward building trust before the technology outruns both. A live audience Q&A closes out the session, pushing the panel further on legacy data, ownership, and industry-wide collaboration.

Guest Bio

Russell Sommers is a Principal at Baker Tilly, where he leads the firm's New York financial services risk advisory practice. With more than 15 years helping insurers, banks, and financial institutions navigate governance, risk, and compliance, he specializes in IT risk and cybersecurity and leads Baker Tilly's IT and cybersecurity examination practice on behalf of more than 30 state departments of insurance.

Meredith Barnes-Cook is a Senior Principal at Datos Insights, with nearly four decades in insurance operations and technology. She began her career at Liberty Mutual, where she spent 33 years in leadership and executive roles across digital, product, and organizational transformation, and went on to build go-to-market strategy at an AI customer experience company before joining Datos Insights. Her current research centers on P&C rating and underwriting technology and, notably for this episode, agentic AI governance.

Spero Zacharias is SVP, Global Information Technology, Major Initiatives at Chubb, a role he has held since 2021, directing a portfolio of cybersecurity programs spanning 54 countries and all of Chubb's commercial and consumer lines. He brings more than three decades in insurance technology and cybersecurity, and deep standards-body pedigree: he chaired the ACORD board from 2017 to 2019 and currently chairs the board of ACORD Solutions Group.

The industry doesn't get to wait for someone else to define what trustworthy data looks like. It has to decide that for itself, before AI makes the decision by default.

This episode was recorded live at ACORD Connect 2026.

Show Notes:

The Trust Deficit in Data:

• Statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics: Russell Sommers on why the danger isn't usually intentional fraud, but confirmation bias — pulling data to prove what you already believe instead of using it to find out what's happening.

• The same dynamic that drives the industry's "we can't because" pattern gets amplified everywhere by social media and deepfakes, where trust itself becomes the thing that gets exploited.

AI as Enabler and Complication, at the Same Time:

• Spero Zacharias framed the core tension of the episode: AI can finally solve for the data handcuffs the industry has lived with for decades, but introduces a new set of verification problems in the process.

• Intelligent document processing is finally unlocking the 80–90% of insurance data that arrives unstructured — but when AI gets the interpretation wrong, human critical thinking becomes more essential, not less.

• The panel drew a hard line between AI making a recommendation a human reviews and agentic AI taking an autonomous action — the stakes for verification change completely once AI is deciding, not just suggesting.

A Governance Model Built for Fields, in a World That Has Outgrown Them:

• The panel challenged whether traditional, fixed-field data governance still fits a world where AI-processed data doesn't arrive pre-labeled and well-defined.

• One reframe from the conversation: shift governance thinking from which fields are required to which risk signals need to be captured.

• The closed claim review is being rethought as continuous, real-time monitoring — catching a bad AI recommendation while it's happening, not years and thousands of transactions later.

Data Ownership Has to Have a Name Attached:

• The clearest agreement on the panel: data accuracy has to be business-owned, even when a technical or data function builds and maintains the systems around it.

• A chief data officer can build the infrastructure, but without a named owner accountable for a specific data element's quality, governance models fail on paper or not.

• Real example: a claims system that used the same word, "death," for three different drop-down values for 15 years, with no institutional memory of what distinguished them.

Standards as an Enabler, Not a Floor:

• Spero Zacharias, drawing on his ACORD board chairmanship: standards exist to anchor an industry to something shared, not to give companies a minimum bar to clear and stop.

• State regulation, NAIC guidance, and ACORD standards are minimum requirements — the panel's challenge to the industry is to build past the floor rather than manage down to it.

• Russell Sommers connected this to compliance: state privacy laws, NAIC's responsible AI principles, Colorado's AI law, New York's Circular Letter 7, and a new NAIC exposure draft on third-party AI use.

Cybersecurity's Human Element:

• Spero Zacharias pointed to the Scattered Spider social engineering attacks, where public data was used to get two-factor authentication credentials reset at multiple insurance companies.

• The most recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report shows AI-enabled vulnerability exploitation rising sharply, even as the panel argued AI-assisted development should make software more secure over time.

An Audience Question on Industry-Wide Collaboration:

• With real-time data connectivity and API integration now possible, the industry has an opening to stop re-keying the same data across broker, insurer, and reinsurer systems.

• The panel pointed to the London market's Solutions Group as a model North America could learn from in building shared, collaborative data infrastructure.

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.