When Emily Selck walks on to the Santa Monica Pier at InsuranceFest this July, she'll bring something most people in the room don't have: a decade of hard-won wisdom on exactly the risk that's keeping every C-suite up at night.
As senior director and national cyber practice leader of the Cyber Center of Excellence at The Baldwin Group, Selck has a front-row seat to what she calls the defining shift of the moment. "2026 is the year of AI," she says - and she means it not as a buzzword, but as a warning and an opportunity wrapped into one.
Here's her insight: as firms grow more deeply dependent on digital placement solutions, the digital infrastructure that carriers and brokers are building together is itself becoming an exposure. The very tools that make the industry faster and smarter are creating new risk terrain that demands new thinking - and new wordings to match.
That's precisely the conversation Selck wants to have at InsuranceFest, where retail brokers, wholesalers, MGAs, reinsurers, carriers, and insurtech innovators converge to advance the industry. It's the right room. Cyber is on the agenda. And Selck brings both the technical depth and the track record - her team at Baldwin has already built API-connected placement tools and AI-enabled strategies that are reshaping how cyber coverage gets placed and priced.
Her message for fellow attendees is direct: cookie-cutter wordings won't keep up with 2026's exposures. The industry needs tailored solutions that actually contemplate the risks living inside the digital infrastructure brokers and carriers are building right now. Selck is proud of what Baldwin has achieved in that space - and InsuranceFest is where she's ready to share it.
Come find her on the Pier. The conversation is worth having.
