For three days at the AIRMIC Annual Conference 2026, delegates discussed artificial intelligence, parametric insurance, captives and geopolitical instability.
Yet when Insurance Business asked 22 senior figures what the conference theme, back to basics, meant to them, not one started with technology.
Instead, they talked about understanding clients, answering calls, maintaining records, checking data quality and developing talent. The consistency of those responses revealed something notable: in a market defined by increasingly complex risks, many of its leaders still see the industry's biggest challenges as matters of execution.
For Stuart Sutherland, head of UK retail at Liberty Specialty Markets, back to basics starts with a simple question: what does the client actually do?
He described a furniture retailer whose insurance programme reflected a straightforward shopfront operation. In reality, the business had evolved into a far more complex enterprise, designing products, manufacturing them, delivering them and installing them. What appeared to be a single risk profile was, in practice, several distinct exposures operating under one policy framework.
"Back to basics means asking: tell me about your business," Sutherland said. "What keeps you up at night? Before we talk about coverage."
Jon Cope, managing director of specialty lines at Intact Insurance, approached the same issue from a different angle. His teams hold weekly floor huddles centred on a single principle: respond promptly to every client contact, even when there is no immediate answer.
"It will absolutely transform your career," he said.
Communication emerged repeatedly, and not only with clients. Research presented by AIRMIC and CNA Hardy found that the financial decision-makers who shape board priorities; equity analysts, credit ratings agencies, investors, rarely look at insurance programmes at all. They look at free cash flow, balance-sheet resilience and leverage. Risk managers who cannot speak that language risk being invisible at the very moments it matters most.
That challenge extends to the information risk managers rely on. Kyle Roper, who leads the analytics proposition for Great Britain at WTW, said the industry has become increasingly adept at gathering data but is not always disciplined in assessing its quality and applying it effectively.
"Rubbish in, rubbish out," he said.
The observation carries greater significance as insurers adopt more sophisticated modelling tools and AI-driven capabilities. Better technology can enhance decision-making, but only if the underlying information is accurate and reliable.
Polly Sayers, Legal Advisor and Insurance Market Analyst, HCR Law, identified a similar pattern from a legal perspective. The most common failures following major incidents are often not the absence of cover, but missing evidence such as outdated policies, incomplete training records or documents lost during system migrations.
"These are considerations that seem obvious day-to-day," she said, "but become critical when incidents occur, and most organisations only discover the gaps when it is already too late."
Both observations pointed to the same conclusion. Sophisticated systems are only as effective as the information and processes that support them.
For Jade Boothroyd, corporate client director at Sedgwick, changing claims dynamics have made execution more important than ever.
Liability injury costs have increased by 50% over the past four years, she said. The increase has been driven less by claim frequency than by severity, particularly among the largest and most complex losses. Climate-related events now account for a 22% share of total reserves, while AI-generated fraudulent claims and evidence are emerging as a new operational challenge.
Against that backdrop, Boothroyd argued that getting the basics right at the outset of a claim has become increasingly valuable.
"Back to basics means getting the fundamentals right first time for the customer," she said. "Despite all the focus on AI and automation, the human touch remains fundamental, and it sets the tone for the entire claims process."
Her point echoed a broader theme from the conference. As risks become more complex, the quality of execution at critical moments becomes more consequential.
The longest-term interpretation of the conference theme came from Caroline Wagstaff, chief executive of the London Market Group.
For Wagstaff, back to basics was fundamentally about people.
The London insurance market employs around 60,000 people and typically recruits approximately 1,200 entry-level employees each year. That intake fell by 25% last year and is expected to fall by a further 25% in 2026. London Market Group modelling from 2024 projected that the proportion of under-30s could decline from 24% to 7% over the next decade and with hiring falling further since, Wagstaff said the picture is likely worse than that figure suggests.
"Catastrophic" was the word Wagstaff used.
"Back to basics is getting 60,000 people to understand what they're doing and why," she said. "It's raising the baseline of knowledge. The London market has a 350-year history of failing to tell its story, and we are still paying for it."
Unlike many operational challenges discussed at the conference, talent shortages unfold over years rather than quarters. The consequences often become visible only after a generation of experience has failed to arrive.
The answers collected throughout AIRMIC did not suggest an industry retreating from innovation. Most of the people interviewed were actively discussing new technologies, new products and new forms of analysis.
What stood out was where they believed the greatest value still lay. When asked what back to basics meant, they returned not to systems or tools but to judgement, communication, discipline and people.
For a conference dominated by discussions of what comes next, that consistency may have been the most revealing answer of all.
