ITC Vegas 2026: What We Heard From Agents, Carriers, and Clients
The Fenris team made its annual appearance at InsureTech Connect (ITC) this year. The conference invited insurers, insurtechs, investors, and solution providers to come together to discover and discuss the technology shaping the future of insurance. We came to listen to what carriers and agencies need from their data, and to share what we’ve learned from customers already putting data to work. Some have cut customer acquisition cost (CAC) by up to 28% and bound 39% more policies from the same agent hours.
Among the sessions and conference chatter, a few topics stood out. Artificial intelligence, as one would expect, recurred as a hot topic. But with every highly saturated subject comes division and alternative perspectives. How can we make AI safe, trustworthy, and controllable for insurance? What becomes the human role in an artificial loop?
Fenris was developing AI solutions long before ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM) assistants went mainstream, so our take on AI roots itself in one basic principle: good decisions have always depended on reliable data and insights, whether the decision maker is a person or a model. AI doesn’t change that; it raises the stakes. Without a proper system to clean and handle data, verify accuracy, and ensure details remain up to date, the risks of running with bad or stale data scale as you go. We found data quality and trustworthiness to be a top concern as we talked with people around the conference.
Jennifer Linton, Fenris CEO and founder, noticed visitors responding to what our booth didn’t say. “We didn’t put ‘AI’ anywhere on our booth, and people told us they appreciated that. Everyone is talking about AI. What they want to know is whether the data behind it is accurate, and that’s where we focus.”
The Pre-ITC Happy Hour
Every year, Fenris hosts a Happy Hour the day before ITC to give high-intent conference-goers the opportunity to connect before the expo hall opens. The evening was accompanied by a gorgeous panoramic view of the Las Vegas Strip, as executives, insurance leaders, and innovators enjoyed bar service provided by none other than Fenris CTO Jay Bourland.
The purpose of this event was not really to pitch products or strike deals; rather, attendees were given a space to unwind and converse among colleagues, associates, and industry professionals. With a long week ahead, our Happy Hour acted as the perfect social appetizer to raise a sense of camaraderie as we reunited with familiar friends and clients. After all, the vast majority of us had traveled all day, so the Happy Hour was not only an excellent primer, it was a well-deserved reward. The next day would be just as exhilarating, and four times as long.
A Day at the ITC Agents Expo
With our data enrichment solutions on full display, the Fenris booth attracted a steady stream of agency owners, independent agents, and consultants at the ITC Agents Expo, a one-day exhibit of booths and activations geared toward insurance agents. From morning to evening, we talked with booth visitors to find out what problems they are trying to solve and where Fenris can be of service.
Walking the expo floor, we counted 7 of roughly 52 exhibitors whose platforms either already integrate Fenris data or are in the process of doing so, a reminder that much of our impact happens behind the scenes in the tools agents use every day.
For many mid-sized agencies and brokerages, data prefill can make a significant difference in their ability to quote accurately and provide a competitive customer experience. When large multi-national carriers and top brokerages are reducing manual intake by prefilling data, the average policy seeker begins to expect an instant quote with minimal effort wherever they go.
Fenris Auto & Property Insurance Prefill solutions enable insurers to instantly retrieve every data point they need to deliver an accurate quote. For auto suite data, only a name and address are required to capture all vehicles associated with the primary driver and their household. For property details and hazard risk data, a simple address input can return a full range of property data and building characteristics.
Mike Balaschi, our Director of Sales and property data expert, noted particularly high interest in quality property data. “It has to be easy to access, comprehensive in coverage, accurate, and able to support both commercial and residential underwriting,” Mike says. “Agents and brokers aren’t only looking for reliable, affordable, and fast data. They’re also looking for a vendor that is flexible, quickly resolves their problems, and provides exceptional customer support. Fenris can promise that.”
While our flagship insurance data prefill solutions gained plenty of attention from insurers looking to solve early-funnel obstacles, we observed an increasing interest in our Predictive Insights, a series of machine learning models designed to provide insurers with powerful recommendations to grow their business. MaKayla Jennings, our Customer Success Manager, observed, “People have expressed the desire to grow without buying more leads. Carriers and distributors want to get more conversions out of the traffic they already have. And post-bind, their focus is on better retention, smarter cross-sell and catching churn risk early.”
From Lead Volume to Lead Value
The lead buying space spans multiple industries, so algorithms and lead enrichment logic built for generic use often fail to translate sufficiently for the insurance world. Fenris is leading the way to give carriers tools to accurately predict how much a lead is worth by the dollar, which leads are most likely to bind based on their unique business outcomes, and where those high-quality leads should be routed based on risk appetite. “Everyone wants to know what a lead is worth before they put money on it,” MaKayla notes.
Fenris Director of Data and Analytics Dylan Blanchard sees the most advanced teams going a step further. “The teams furthest along aren’t asking ‘what will this lead do?’ anymore,” he explains. “They’re asking ‘what should we do about it?’ That means what to pay for a lead, which agent should take it, and which existing customers to call to keep them or grow the relationship. When agent time is limited, those decisions are connected. A lead that would pay off can still be the wrong one to buy if it takes time away from a better one.”
By optimizing lead spend and routing through Fenris Predictive Insights, we’ve seen significant success in bound policies and CAC reduction. Our models learn on historical outcomes and predict behavior, as opposed to simply following a set of logic rules. These complex machine learning models are designed to continuously evolve and retrain themselves, thus sharpening their predictions and the decisions built on them over time.
Conversations around AI in insurance are maturing both on and off the conference floor. The question is no longer whether insurers will adopt it, but whether they can trust what it produces.
With reliable data to give AI agents and machine learning models accurate context, the future of insurance will be both efficient and accurate with humans guiding the most important decisions. Fenris is building secure and reliable enriched data, so carriers can move forward with AI on a trustworthy foundation.
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