Hackers using artificial intelligence have made every small business, including insurance brokerages, a cyber target, and brokers who get educated on the risk fastest stand to gain the most, according to Paul MacDonald (pictured centre right), executive vice-president of personal insurance and digital channels at Definity.
Speaking on an insurer executive panel at the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario’s (IBAO) 2026 convention in Toronto, MacDonald said cyber has become the industry’s most pressing emerging exposure.
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“The single biggest risk that is facing all of us moving forward is likely cyber risk (outside of climate change),” MacDonald said.
Cyber used to be a concern mainly for large multinationals holding large volumes of data, MacDonald said. That has changed.
“What’s new about this is that now every business and every person is subject to that risk,” he said. “It used to be hackers would not be interested in a small commercial enterprise because what’s the value? Hackers are now using AI, and they just get vulnerabilities across the board. So every small business, every brokerage itself, is at risk of a hack and a leak and all the liability associated with it.”
He pointed to the recent privacy case against Meta to show how quickly liability can build. A New Mexico judge handed down the penalty on October 21, 2026, ordering Meta to pay $25 billion as part of a data privacy case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The jury had found more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, each carrying a penalty of up to $5,000, and the judge calculated a maximum penalty of $219.5 billion before reducing it to $25 billion. Meta has said it plans to appeal.
“Imagine if you had a $5,000 charge for every single one of your clients. So you can imagine how quickly this stuff accumulates,” MacDonald said.
MacDonald said falling cyber rates mask a market that is still working out what it will and won’t cover, as insurers carve out exposures they don’t want to take on.
“Is cyber going to expand to involve everything, or are we going to have cyber cover for one unit? Are we going to have AI risk as a separate cover?” he said.
He said that uncertainty creates room for growth, because the risk now touches every customer and every business.
IBAO CEO Colin Simpson (pictured left), who moderated the panel, said brokers at an earlier session on auto insurance and accident benefits had asked for more education on how coverages work and how claims develop. He asked the panel what insurers could do to help.
Matthew Turack (pictured second from right), group president and chief operating officer of CAA Insurance, said products will keep evolving, and brokers are best placed to identify what customers need.
“I think this is a great opportunity to listen to the needs of our customers through our brokers,” Turack said.
He said the same applies to accident benefits, where consumers now have more options.
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“We believe in choice. I think choice is a good thing. Optionality is a great thing,” Turack said.
More choice means insurers have to provide more education, he said, including plain-language explanations of coverages such as income replacement and needs-assessment tools brokers can use with customers. When CAA published educational material around the auto reforms, he said, millions of people viewed the pages, many of them not CAA clients or broker partners.
“Can we, as an industry, do more of that? And should we do more of that? I don’t think it stops. I think it’s continuous education and continuous involvement,” Turack said.
MacDonald said the same urgency applies to cyber.
“If you’re sitting in the audience wondering, ' What do I do about this?,' educate yourself as fast as possible. That’s probably the single biggest opportunity for premium and revenue growth in the market right now,” he said.
