What Happens Behind the Badge: Inside ITC Vegas 2026

Every year, ITC Vegas becomes the center of gravity for the insurance and InsurTech world for roughly a week. Most attendees know the Expo Hall, the main stage, the kiosks. Almost none of them know what happens on the third floor, in the invite-only regulator room, or in the six-figure sponsor upgrades that started as a $6,000 startup kiosk two years earlier.

In Episode 169 of InsurTechTalk, I sat down with Nicole Peck, President of ITC, and Patti Harman, ITC’s Head of Content, for a full preview of this year’s event — the theme, the structure, the speakers, and the parts of the show that most of the industry never sees but that actually move the industry forward.

About Nicole Peck and Patti Harman

Nicole Peck is President of ITC, now heading into her fourth year with the brand — her third since putting her own creative stamp on the event, having joined seven weeks before the 2023 show. Patti Harman joined ITC five months prior to this recording as Head of Content, bringing nearly two decades of insurance media experience. Before ITC, she spent two years as Editor-in-Chief of Digital Insurance, where she also led the Women in Insurance Leadership Program. Before that, she covered the industry at ALM through PropertyCasualty360.com and Claims Magazine, and before that, spent roughly 20 years covering the disaster restoration industry — giving her deep, hands-on knowledge of the P&C side long before she had to learn workers comp and health insurance for her later roles.

The 2026 Theme: Horizon of Possibilities

ITC has taken a thematic approach to its programming for the last several years. The event went to space with “Universe of Possibilities,” then addressed the disorientation of the AI era with “Wonderland of Possibilities” — an Alice in Wonderland framing for an industry trying to navigate a world AI had turned upside down.

This year’s theme is “Horizon of Possibilities,” built around an ocean and undersea visual metaphor. The horizon line is the central image: a fixed point in the distance that is nonetheless always moving as you approach it. The programming asks attendees to read the current, read the tide, and pay attention to the signals both above and beneath the surface — what is visible in the industry right now, and what is happening underneath that most people aren’t tracking yet.

The Week Got Restructured — Here’s Why

ITC discovered that 85 to 90 percent of attendees were already arriving Tuesday morning, even though the event’s real programming historically didn’t kick off until Tuesday night. The response: Tuesday is now packed with content from first thing in the morning, anchored by a new slate of curated summits. The golf tournament — which didn’t exist a few years ago and now anchors the week’s social kickoff — has moved to Monday, making ITC effectively a full week rather than a three-day conference.

The New 2026 Summits

Claims and Fraud
AI
Commercial and Specialty Lines
Healthcare Funding and Capacity
Underwriting
Cybersecurity

Every one of those summits threads back to the same underlying question, according to Patti: how is AI going to change my specific job — whether that’s underwriting, claims, fraud, or cybersecurity. The goal behind the new structure is twofold: create a genuine fear of missing out for anyone not there Tuesday morning, and give every attendee a “find your tribe” moment — a session specifically built for their function, whether that’s underwriting, IT, or something else entirely.

Why Panels Rarely Say Anything Controversial — And Where the Real Talk Happens

This is a dynamic I know firsthand from trying to book carrier guests on this show — publicly traded companies route everything through legal and PR review, and by the time a panel actually happens, most of the risk has been engineered out of what anyone is willing to say on stage.

Patti’s explicit mandate to this year’s presenters: challenge the norm. She doesn’t want panels that agree with each other. She wants one speaker to describe an approach and another to push back with a genuine alternative. Her read on where that kind of honesty actually shows up: founders and IT-level speakers tend to have far more freedom to talk through what worked, what failed, and what they’d do differently than senior executives from publicly traded carriers, who are constrained by what they legally can and cannot say.

The Room Most Attendees Don’t Know Exists

Regulators attend ITC too — and their presence is deliberately low-profile. Many are elected officials operating under constraints on what they can discuss publicly or with whom, given state-level regulatory obligations. Nicole’s description of the broader phenomenon: there is a significant amount of private event space on the third floor of the convention center, plus meeting space tucked away from the main Expo floor — and the conversations happening in those rooms are genuinely shaping where the industry moves, for better or worse, depending entirely on who ends up in the room.

One of the more quietly remarkable things Nicole described is ITC’s startup pipeline. The event offers startups a low-cost kiosk entry point specifically designed to be accessible — a place to showcase their product and start building a client base. The pattern Nicole has watched repeat: a startup takes a modest kiosk one year, secures a major funding round, and returns the following year as a high-six-figure sponsor, because they’ve identified ITC as the place to make their biggest possible launch statement. For Nicole, it’s one of the most validating parts of running the event — direct evidence that ITC is investing in the industry’s growth, not just hosting it.

Main Stage: Alex Honnold

This year’s marquee main stage speaker is Alex Honnold, the first person to free solo climb El Capitan — climbing without ropes or safety equipment. Nicole’s rationale for booking speakers who operate at the outer edge of human capability (a previous year featured an astronaut): watching someone who has redefined what’s possible in their own domain tends to reframe how a room full of insurance professionals thinks about risk, possibility, and their own horizon. At the time of this recording, two additional main stage speakers were still being finalized and not yet ready for public announcement.

Women in Insurance: The Forum and the Founders

Patti personally programmed the Women’s Forum, a two-hour session on Wednesday afternoon featuring a keynote and three company executives sharing their career journeys, lessons learned, and where they see their own role evolving within the industry.

She also built deliberate representation into the Founders Forum on Thursday morning — a session with no shortage of strong male executive candidates, where Patti specifically ensured two women CEOs were included on the program.

The Badge Ribbon System

ITC has run badge ribbons for a few years now — attendees can select ribbons signaling shared identity or intent: a Women’s Leadership Forum ribbon, a Black Leadership Forum ribbon, an “I’m hiring” ribbon, and even a playful “White Rabbit” ribbon tied to this year’s theme, which one past attendee used specifically to find and connect with other White Rabbit ribbon-wearers on the floor. The mechanism is simple but effective: lower the barrier to striking up a conversation with a stranger who has already signaled something you have in common.

The Real Value Is in the In-Between Moments

Both Nicole and Patti independently arrived at the same conclusion: the scheduled sessions are only part of what makes ITC valuable. The unscheduled moments — the coffee line, the hallway run-in, even (for women specifically) the line for the restroom — are where some of the most genuine, unscripted conversations happen. Nicole’s advice for attendees: deliberately build unstructured time into your schedule rather than back-to-back booking every hour. Go get the coffee. Go enjoy a beer at the beer garden. Give the in-between moments room to happen, because they often produce the connections that matter most.

Practical Tips for Attendees

Wear comfortable shoes — this is a multi-day, high-mileage event
Block time on your calendar for breaks, not just meetings
Most hotels offer ironing and pressing services — use them rather than packing a travel iron
Treat Wednesday as your walkthrough day on the Expo floor to get a lay of the land; use Thursday for scheduled meetings and follow-up conversations informed by what you saw Wednesday

The Closing Answers: Collaboration and the Next Generation

Patti’s answer to what the industry should be talking about more: how to collaborate better, and how technology is actively reshaping what collaboration even looks like. It’s a theme she tried to weave through the panels and topics she programmed this year.

Nicole’s answer: the industry needs a better conversation about what it takes to recruit the next generation of talent — and about making the personal, human side of insurance genuinely appealing to young professionals who might otherwise never consider the industry at all.

Key Takeaways

ITC Vegas 2026’s theme, “Horizon of Possibilities,” uses an ocean and horizon-line metaphor to frame an industry trying to read both visible trends and undercurrents simultaneously
The event restructured around attendee behavior — Tuesday is now the highest-density content day, with the golf tournament moved to Monday to make room
The most candid conversations tend to come from founders and IT leaders rather than executives at publicly traded carriers, who operate under tighter public communication constraints
A significant amount of substantive, industry-shaping conversation happens in private meeting spaces and regulator rooms most attendees never see
ITC’s low-cost startup kiosk model has become a genuine pipeline — startups that enter small often return as major sponsors once they’ve raised significant funding
The unscheduled moments of a conference (coffee lines, hallway conversations) are frequently as valuable as the programmed sessions, and deserve to be deliberately protected on your calendar

Nicole Peck & Patti Harman, ITC Vegas