ITC Vegas bills itself as the world’s largest insurance innovation event, and the 2026 edition is ten days away. It runs September 29 to October 1 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The organizers expect more than 9,000 attendees, 500-plus speakers and over 600 exhibitors, spread across 14 content stages and 200 hours of programming. Nobody will see all of it.
Tuesday Finally Counts
The biggest structural change is the calendar. Tuesday, September 29 is now a formal programming day, which turns ITC into a proper three-day conference. The organizers also cut the number of fragmented tracks and added stages for Life, Benefits & Annuities, Growth, Operational Efficiency, Strategic Foresight and a Solutions Stage.
The theme is “The Horizon of Possibilities: Predict, Prepare, Progress,” and the editorial spine is growth, operational efficiency and strategic foresight. Expect more summits, more deep dives and more roundtables in the Community Center, and fewer people wandering between talks that are really product demos.
The AI Talk Gets Specific
Tuesday’s summits cover AI-powered innovation, claims transformation, commercial lines, health innovation, modern underwriting, independent agents and agentic insurance. That last one is the label to watch. Attendee guides say the conversation is moving past chatbots and content generation toward governed workflows, meaning AI that touches underwriting, pricing, claims and fraud with controls attached.
My read: carriers stopped being impressed by demos a while ago. They want to know who signs off when the model gets a claim wrong. Sessions that answer that question will be full.
Follow the Checkbooks
The State Farm Startup Pitch Competition runs Tuesday from 2:00 to 5:00 PM. It’s the fifth year for it. More than 400 startups are attending, along with roughly twenty venture firms and financial institutions, among them Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and MS&AD Ventures. VC Office Hours on Wednesday afternoon give founders a no-pitch way to meet them.
The speaker list has the buy side and the sell side in the same building. Ryan Tunis of Cantor Fitzgerald and Alex Scott of Barclays cover insurers for a living. Matt Stejskal of CNO Financial and Sara Phillips of Great American Insurance Company do the corporate development work, which means they’re the ones actually acquiring and investing. If you want to know which insurtech categories are getting funded and which are getting folded into incumbents, listen to those rooms first.
Logistics Worth Knowing
About 1,900 carrier attendees are expected, so the meeting zones will be busy. The golf tournament is on September 28, the day before the doors open. Hotel rooms at Mandalay Bay and the W are sold out. The Luxor is the official alternative, with an indoor walkway to the venue.