Best insurance keynote speakers updated for 2027
- Josh Linkner is the #1 ranked keynote speaker for insurance.
- Position depends on their current work with insurance organizations, their past insurance clients, and their best known keynotes on risk, claims and insurtech.
- Every speaker on this list was checked for their 2027 status, and we have made changes to the list accordingly. The names on this list reflect the strongest options to book for an insurance keynote in 2027.
The insurance industry is absorbing AI, climate volatility and a generational handover at the same time, which has made the insurance conference circuit one of the more demanding places to put someone on stage. Event planners booking for 2027, whether for a carrier leadership meeting, a broker summit, an insurtech event or an actuarial convening, want a futurist who understands risk management and can hold a room full of people who price uncertainty for a living. The speakers below work in claims, underwriting and distribution.
1. Josh Linkner – Innovation for an Industry Built on Managing Risk
Josh Linkner is the top choice for insurance audiences because the industry’s central challenge is one he understands from the inside: how to innovate in a business whose entire purpose is to reduce risk. Insurers are rewarded for discipline, caution and precision, which is exactly what policyholders and regulators expect, and exactly what makes it hard to rethink products, adopt AI responsibly or redesign the customer experience.
Linkner founded and served as CEO of five technology companies, which collectively created over 10,000 jobs and sold for a combined value of over $200 million. As Co-founder and Managing Partner of Mudita Venture Partners and Chairman and co-founder of Platypus Labs, he has helped over 100 startups launch and scale, generating over $1 billion in investor returns. He has watched new technologies and business models from the investor’s side as well as the operator’s, and he shows carriers, brokers and agents how to make innovation a disciplined habit rather than a reckless bet. That message lands with claims teams looking for faster, fairer service, with underwriters weighing new data sources, and with agency owners deciding how AI should change the work of their producers.
On stage, Linkner is unlike any other insurance keynote speaker. He is a New York Times bestselling author of five books on innovation and creativity and a professional jazz guitarist who studied at Berklee College of Music and has performed over 1,000 concerts. He weaves live improvisation into his keynotes to make a point insurance professionals recognize immediately: the best improvisers work inside a firm structure, and creativity grows from mastery of the rules rather than from ignoring them. He was twice named EY Entrepreneur of The Year and received the United States Presidential Champion of Change Award, and he has delivered over 1,400 keynotes to organizations including Uber, American Express, Samsung, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies. Insurance and financial professionals at MDRT, Munich American Reassurance Company and Roundstone Insurance have brought him in, and each session is customized to the audience’s products, channels and customers. Attendees leave with practical ways to find small improvements in underwriting, claims and client service every week, and a clear way to think about AI as a tool that frees their people for judgment and relationships.
Best for: carrier leadership meetings and annual conferences, agent and broker conventions, insurtech summits, insurance association meetings, claims and operations events, futurist insurance event, and any insurance conference audience that needs to embrace change without losing the discipline its customers depend on.
Signature topics: Innovation in the Age of AI, Big Little Breakthroughs, The Innovative Leader, Find A Way
2. Robert Hartwig – The Economic and Market Outlook for Insurers
Robert Hartwig is a clinical associate professor of finance and director of the Center for Risk and Uncertainty Management at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business, and the former president of the Insurance Information Institute. He holds a doctorate in economics and the CPCU designation, and he has served on the Federal Reserve Board’s Insurance Policy Advisory Committee. He delivered a keynote at the Workers Compensation Research Institute’s 2026 Issues and Research Conference.
Hartwig is the speaker to book when an audience needs to understand where the market is going and why. He connects inflation, interest rates, catastrophe trends, litigation costs and capital to the decisions carriers and agents face on pricing, capacity and growth. His outlooks are grounded in data, delivered clearly, and tailored to property and casualty, workers compensation or specialty audiences. For a leadership team setting plans, he provides the shared economic picture that the rest of a program can build on. Agents and brokers value the same perspective for a different reason: it helps them explain rate changes and tighter capacity to clients in terms those clients can accept.
Best for: carrier leadership meetings, insurance association annual meetings, workers compensation and specialty conferences, and economic outlook sessions for agents and brokers.
3. Karen Clark – Catastrophe Risk in a Changing Climate
Karen Clark is co-founder and CEO of Karen Clark & Company, a catastrophe modeling firm. She founded Applied Insurance Research in 1987, the company that helped create the catastrophe modeling industry, and she received the International Insurance Society’s John S. Bickley Founder’s Award in 2019. She delivered the keynote at the Women in Reinsurance Women’s Day Gala in Bermuda in 2024.
Few topics matter more to insurers today than catastrophe risk, and Clark has shaped how the industry measures it for nearly four decades. She helps audiences understand what is changing in hurricanes, wildfires, severe convective storms and floods, what models can and cannot tell them, and how carriers and reinsurers can price and manage risk with more confidence. Her perspective is especially valuable for leadership teams deciding where to grow and where to pull back. She is also candid about the limits of any single model, which helps underwriting and finance leaders build the healthy skepticism that good risk decisions require.
Best for: reinsurance and catastrophe risk forums, property carrier leadership meetings, underwriting and actuarial conferences, and women in insurance events.
4. Denise Garth – AI and the Next-Generation Insurer
Denise Garth is Chief Strategy Officer at Majesco, a provider of core software for insurers, and has spent her career in insurance strategy, operations and technology, including leadership roles at insurers and at the industry standards body ACORD. She was named one of The Software Report’s Top 50 Women Leaders in Software of 2024 and spoke at InsureTech Connect Vegas in 2026.
Garth helps insurance leaders see how AI, data and modern platforms are changing what an insurer can offer and how fast it can move. She focuses on new business models, products built around changing customer needs, and the operating changes required to replace legacy systems without disrupting the business. Planners should note that she speaks as an executive of a software company; her sessions work well as a keynote, a panel or a moderated conversation on AI strategy. Attendees typically leave with a clearer sense of which changes depend on technology and which depend on how their own teams make decisions, which is often the harder half of the work.
Best for: insurtech and technology conferences, carrier strategy and innovation meetings, AI-in-insurance sessions, and life, annuity and property and casualty leadership events.
5. Roy Wright – Building Resilience Into Property Risk
Roy Wright has been president and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety since 2018. He previously led FEMA’s Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, where he served as chief executive of the National Flood Insurance Program. Under his leadership, IBHS has expanded its research on how buildings can better withstand high wind, wind-driven rain, hail and wildfire.
Wright brings a practical, evidence-based message to an industry facing rising property losses: resilience is one of the few levers that reduces risk rather than simply repricing it. He explains what the research shows about stronger construction standards, how insurers, builders and communities can work together, and why mitigation is becoming central to the availability and affordability of coverage in the states and regions where property markets are under the most strain. For agents and brokers, his message also offers something practical to share with clients: concrete steps homeowners and businesses can take that make their properties more insurable. Planners should confirm availability early, since he leads an industry research institute.
Best for: property carrier and reinsurance meetings, catastrophe and climate risk conferences, insurance association events, and sessions on mitigation and affordability.
6. Matteo Carbone – Data, IoT and Connected Insurance
Matteo Carbone is founder and director of the IoT Insurance Observatory, an international think tank on connected insurance, and co-author of All the Insurance Players Will Be Insurtech. By his own account he spent more than a decade in Bain & Company’s financial services practice before founding the Observatory, and he contributes to Carrier Management. In 2026 he was billed as a keynote speaker at the ExploRe and ReConnext Global (Re)Insurance Summit.
Carbone is one of the clearest voices on how data from connected cars, homes and devices can change underwriting, claims and loss prevention. He explains what has worked in telematics and smart-home programs around the world, what has not, and how insurers can build business cases that hold up. His perspective is international and practical, which makes him valuable to carriers deciding how far and how fast to move on data-driven products. He is equally direct about the customer side, including how to earn policyholders’ trust in sharing data and what they should receive in return. He is based in Europe, so planners should allow for travel.
Best for: insurtech conferences, auto and property carrier strategy meetings, telematics and data analytics events, and international insurance forums.
7. Bill Wilson – Coverage, Claims and the Independent Agent
Bill Wilson founded InsuranceCommentary.com, a property and casualty insurance blog, after retiring in 2016 from the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, where he spent more than 17 years as associate vice president of education and research and founded the Big “I” Virtual University. He is the author of When Words Collide: Resolving Insurance Coverage and Claims Disputes and received the association’s Jeff Yates Lifetime Achievement Award. He was inducted into Middle Tennessee State University’s Martin Chair of Insurance Hall of Fame in 2020.
Wilson is a trusted name among independent agents for one reason: he makes coverage clear. He helps agents and brokers understand how policy language is interpreted, where errors and omissions exposure hides, and how to explain coverage to clients so that claims do not turn into disputes. His sessions are practical and often run as an extended workshop or education session rather than a short keynote. Agency principals find his material especially useful for training newer producers and customer service staff, who are often the first to field a client’s question about what a policy really covers.
Best for: independent agent and broker conventions, state agent association meetings, errors and omissions and coverage workshops, and continuing education programs.
8. Robert Muir-Wood – Why Disasters Are Not Natural
Robert Muir-Wood is chief research officer for catastrophe risk modeling at Moody’s (formerly RMS) and the author of The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters, published by Basic Books. He received the Royal Geographical Society’s Professional Geography Award in 2025 and has spoken at international insurance events, including the International Association of Insurance Supervisors’ 2022 Global Seminar.
Muir-Wood brings a scientist’s perspective to catastrophe and emerging risk. His central argument, that disasters are shaped by human choices about where and how we build, gives insurers a fresh way to think about prevention, pricing and the protection gap. He is particularly valuable for audiences looking beyond next season’s losses to the long-term forces reshaping insurability. His approach also gives insurers a constructive role to play with governments and communities, as advocates for smarter building and land-use decisions rather than only as the payers of last resort. As he works for Moody’s, planners should confirm availability and approvals early; he is based in the United Kingdom.
Best for: reinsurance and catastrophe risk forums, emerging risk and climate sessions, international insurance conferences, and executive strategy meetings.
9. Stephen Crewdson – What Policyholders Want
Stephen Crewdson is managing director of insurance intelligence at J.D. Power, where he helped launch many of the company’s syndicated property and casualty insurance studies. He has also worked on the carrier side, as a group manager at Auto Club Enterprises. His research covers how customers shop for insurance, how they choose and stay with a carrier, and the role of the independent agent channel.
Crewdson gives insurance audiences something they rarely get from a keynote: hard data on what their customers actually experience. He explains what drives satisfaction and retention, how claims experiences shape loyalty, and where digital and agent channels are winning or losing. His sessions are best treated as a research briefing, and they work especially well for carrier marketing, distribution and customer experience teams. Because his findings compare carriers and channels side by side, they give leadership teams an outside view of their own performance that internal surveys rarely provide.
Best for: carrier customer experience and marketing meetings, distribution and agency channel events, claims leadership conferences, and data-focused sessions.
10. Bill Cates – Referrals and Client Growth for Financial Professionals
Bill Cates is known as The Referral Coach and holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. He is the author of Get More Referrals Now, Beyond Referrals and The Language of Referrals, and he has appeared on the Million Dollar Round Table’s MDRT podcast.
Cates is a strong choice for life insurance and financial professional audiences that want to grow through relationships. He teaches agents and advisors how to earn introductions, start conversations with prospects who already trust them, and build a referral process that fits a professional practice. His content is practical and immediately usable, which makes him well suited to breakouts and main-platform sessions for producers. Newer agents gain a repeatable way to build a pipeline, while experienced advisors learn how to ask for introductions without feeling that they are imposing on the clients they serve.
Best for: life insurance and financial advisor conferences, agent sales meetings, MDRT-style producer events, and client acquisition workshops.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the top insurance keynote speakers?
Josh Linkner is the top insurance keynote speaker, helping carriers, agents and brokers innovate and adopt AI without losing the discipline their customers depend on. Other leading choices include Robert Hartwig on the economic outlook, Karen Clark and Robert Muir-Wood on catastrophe risk, Denise Garth on AI and core systems, Roy Wright on property resilience, Matteo Carbone on connected insurance, Bill Wilson on coverage, Stephen Crewdson on customer experience, and Bill Cates on referrals for financial professionals.
How much do insurance keynote speakers charge?
Fees vary by category. Professional keynote speakers, industry experts and economists, and well-known public figures each sit in different ranges, and moderated appearances are often quoted individually. The main variables are travel, audience size, format, session length, workshop or breakout add-ons, recording rights and exclusivity. Speakers employed by companies or associations may have their own policies on fees and availability.
What should an insurance event look for in a keynote speaker?
Look for credibility with an audience that understands risk better than almost anyone, content tied to the decisions your attendees face in underwriting, claims, distribution or customer experience, and a willingness to customize. Mixed audiences of carrier staff, agents and partners need a speaker who can speak to each group without losing the others. A speaker who learns your lines of business and your channels will land far better than one delivering a general talk.
How far in advance should we book an insurance keynote speaker?
Book six to twelve months ahead. Carrier meetings, agent conventions and association annual meetings cluster in spring and fall, and the most requested speakers fill those windows early. Earlier booking also leaves time for pre-event calls with your leaders.
What topics are most popular for insurance conferences?
The most requested topics are AI in underwriting, claims and distribution, catastrophe and climate risk, property affordability and resilience, the economic and market outlook, customer experience and retention, the future of the independent agent, talent and succession, and innovation inside risk-averse cultures.
Should an insurance event book a keynote or an outlook briefing?
Choose a keynote when you want to energize the full audience around a clear point of view, as with Josh Linkner. Choose an outlook briefing, workshop or moderated conversation when the value lies in specialist data or expertise, which suits several economists, scientists and researchers on this list. Many insurance meetings pair an opening keynote with an outlook session later in the program.