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