Six Weeks Out From a Show With 700 Exhibitors and Fourteen Concurrent Stages

Recorded on September 3rd, six weeks before the doors opened, this was a planning-season conversation with Bill Harris about what ITC Vegas 2025 was going to be — and, more usefully for anyone attending, how to actually navigate it.

Bill had recently taken over hosting duties on ITC’s own podcast, a handover he described as a major milestone and emphatically not an easy one. His solution was to bring on Rocio Sarriegui Zulueta as co-host rather than carry it alone — she asks the best questions, in his estimation, and brings genuine subject matter expertise. That led us into a digression on whether anyone in insurance does podcasting as an actual career. Neither of us could name one. For essentially everyone in this corner of the industry it stays a passion project — good microphones, decent lighting, no revenue model.

In Episode 139 of InsurTechTalk, Bill and I covered the neighborhood concept reshaping the show floor, the new programming tracks, and what a first-timer — or a tenth-timer — should actually do with three days.

About Bill Harris

Bill Harris is the Chief Revenue Officer of InsureTech Connect, the organization behind ITC Vegas and its international editions across Europe, London, Asia, Japan, and LatAm. He hosts ITC’s own podcast alongside co-host Rocio Sarriegui Zulueta, and was involved in recruiting speakers to the very first Vegas event in 2016. Before insurance, he worked in the newspaper business, building technology for newspaper sales.

Why Vegas, Explained to a Skeptical Englishman

The best story in the conversation was about recruiting Nigel Walsh — now at ServiceNow — to the very first ITC nine or ten years ago.

Nigel’s initial read on the invitation was that Bill and Jay were trying to lure him on “a jolly” — British slang for a trip dressed up as work. He heard “conference in Vegas” and assumed gambling. He warmed up considerably once he heard who else was speaking.

The actual reasoning behind the location is strategic, and Bill’s explanation is the clearest justification for the venue I have heard:

• Hold it in New York and attendees spend the week with clients, not at the conference
• Hold it in San Francisco and they spend it on Sand Hill Road raising money or meeting LPs
• Nobody has clients in Vegas — so people actually attend the sessions and work the expo hall

The Neighborhood Concept

The structural change Bill was most animated about is how the floor gets organized. Rather than one undifferentiated expo, ITC groups content, stages, and exhibitors into themed neighborhoods so attendees can find their people.

• LatAm was the first neighborhood, followed by innovation — startups in kiosks alongside a demo stage
• Life, health, and benefits was added the prior year and expanded significantly for 2025
• New this year: a full distribution neighborhood with its own stage, mixing agent, broker, MGA, and MGU content
• Upstairs tracks cover claims, underwriting, and innovation, with roughly 14 stages running concurrently
• A dedicated cyber summit ran Thursday as a full day on cyber issues in insurance

The distribution push built on a program spearheaded by Bill’s colleague Drake Lawhead the previous year, which drew strong reviews. ITC had always run pockets of this — capacity connect for MGAs, plenty of broker programming — but focusing squarely on independent agents proved to be a significant unlock.

Monday Is No Longer a Travel Day

The show runs Tuesday through Thursday, but Monday has quietly filled up:

• The first annual ITC Vegas golf tournament, with Steve Goldstein as honorary tournament director
• A full day of programming with WISE (Women in Insurance Sharing Empowerment), run with Danielle Simick’s group, feeding into ITC Agents on Tuesday
• Community meetups including the Black Leadership Forum, which Bill hosts, and a women’s leadership forum

Main Stage: Two Bookends

• Wednesday opener: Jesse Cole, the man in the yellow tuxedo behind the Savannah Bananas and the inventor of banana ball. He had recently sold out Camden Yards on consecutive nights, Nationals Park, and two games at Yankee Stadium within two hours of tickets going on sale. His talk was about applying that fan-obsession playbook to customer experience.
• Thursday: Liberty Mutual CEO Tim Sweeney — a Fortune 100 company — in a fireside chat with the presenting sponsor.
• Closing party: the Goo Goo Dolls, indoors as with Boyz II Men the previous year, in a venue intimate enough to stand within arm’s reach of the stage.

This connects to something I have argued for years: the value of importing knowledge from outside an industry. The seams between industries are where innovation tends to live — a mindset that is unremarkable in one sector can be transformative in another. Bill’s framing for it was cross-training. You do not only lift weights.

Advice for First-Timers — and Tenth-Timers

ITC takes over essentially all of Mandalay Bay’s conference center, so the logistics alone are a challenge.

• A first-timers webinar runs in late September, plus an in-person orientation and a guided tour of the expo hall on Tuesday
• Badge ribbons identify the OGs who attended the original 2016 show at the Las Vegas Convention Center
• Students attend through a partnership with the Spencer Educational Foundation — talent development being an acute issue as the industry works through its demographic turnover
• The app releases roughly six weeks out, and meeting requests start flowing immediately
• ITC Vegas Week lists 50-plus satellite events around Mandalay Bay on the ITC website under “things to do”

The single most repeated piece of advice, from both of us: comfortable shoes. Bill estimates 10,000-plus steps a day. I typically log 20,000 to 30,000.

Where the AI Conversation Actually Stood

Bill’s read on the AI discourse heading into the show was refreshingly grounded. Everyone was talking about AI, agentic AI, and eventually AGI — but MIT research suggested adoption was slower than the noise implied, and a Liberty Mutual report found agents enthusiastic in principle while still working out where it genuinely applies.

His pitch for the show was that this is precisely the gap a conference closes: if you are technical, you get to ask hundreds of technical people at carriers and reinsurers where they are actually seeing ROI, rather than reading another vendor deck.

Key Takeaways

• The neighborhood concept exists to solve a discovery problem — at roughly 700 exhibitors and 600 speakers, helping attendees find their flock matters more than adding content
• Distribution got its own neighborhood and stage in 2025, the clearest signal yet of ITC’s expansion into the independent agent and broker world
• Monday is now programmed rather than a travel day — golf tournament, WISE programming, and community meetups
• Main stage speakers are deliberately drawn from outside insurance, on the theory that cross-industry ideas are where innovation originates
• The honest AI framing: enthusiasm is universal, applied ROI is still being worked out, and peer conversations are the fastest way to find out what is real
• Wear comfortable shoes