Douglas Turk (pictured), president of specialty at Relation Insurance Services, a Chicago-based insurance brokerage, says the fastest change happening in specialty insurance right now is not a new product line – it is how quickly brokers can turn expert knowledge into a placed policy. Turk joined Relation in October 2025 to build out its specialty platform after leading Albert G. Rubin’s entertainment risk business during his time at Aon, a firm Relation later acquired. He spoke with Insurance Business about how buyer sophistication, artificial intelligence (AI) and disciplined hiring are reshaping specialty brokerage.
Turk pointed to cyber insurance as the clearest illustration of how far specialty lines have evolved. “Cyber originally came out of a property policy,” he said. “It was essentially about personally identifiable information that was stolen, and it was primarily about remediation: how to notify and tell people that their information had been compromised.”
“Now take that and think about what it is today,” Turk continued. “Cyber is fully a line of business focused on risk avoidance, risk mitigation, and analysis. It has evolved far beyond informational loss to something that is financial – that can involve being held hostage. All of these things have developed over time.” That shift mirrors how cyber placement strategy has grown more segmented across carriers in the past several years, as competing loss profiles replace what was once a far more uniform product.
Turk said the underlying driver behind that evolution has stayed consistent for 15 to 20 years. “That evolution over the last 20 years has really been driven by the demands and needs of the client, and the nuance of the markets responding to that demand in ways that have produced a much more specific and specialized product,” he said.
As Relation scales, Turk said the priority is faster access to the specialists the firm already has, not simply hiring more of them. He described recording several of Relation’s specialists for six to seven hours each, “asking a variety of questions: When you’re placing cyber insurance, what are the things to look for? What are normal limits?” Those sessions were transcribed into what he called Relation’s specialty advisor model, an internal tool that lets any employee query a specialist’s recorded expertise directly.
“That shortens cycle time,” Turk said, adding that the firm also captures underwriting information while the conversation happens, so it can populate applications and submissions in real time rather than afterward. He described applying the same logic to renewals, using a client’s past certificate and auto ID card requests to anticipate what they will need again. The approach fits into Relation’s broader push to combine specialist teams with proprietary AI tools across entertainment, aviation and financial lines, part of a specialty platform Turk said is built to avoid, in his words, fighting “a land war in Asia on headcount.” As the brokerage expands, it has also moved to bring in outside expertise directly, including Relation’s recent hiring within management liability and cyber risk from competing brokerages.
Turk was careful to separate scale from substitution. “You never replace that,” he said of the specialist’s role. “There’s always a specialist in the process, and usually the specialist comes in at the point where the producer says, ‘I’ve got the information, my client is interested – would you like to talk to them?’ That’s when the expert enters.”
Asked to name the single innovation most likely to change how specialty risk gets placed over the next year, Turk did not hesitate: artificial intelligence. He reached for an analogy from a much earlier era of construction. “If this interview were happening 200 years ago and we were talking about the invention of the front-end loader for construction – it would monumentally change that industry, but you’d still have to figure out how to use it and understand its limitations,” he said. “That’s very much where we are today with AI.”
Turk was direct about what will not change. “Brokerage is not going to change,” he said. “The relationship between a client, a broker, and a market is going to exist, and no technology will ever change that fundamental tri-party relationship.” What AI will do, he said, is improve risk selection for markets, give brokers better-analyzed information and help clients understand their options.
“What it does is essentially level everybody up – giving them better insight and capability than they’ve ever had before,” Turk said. “The best companies won’t try to rely on AI and technology they think is smarter than them. They’ll use it as a tool that helps their intelligence, their clients, and their expertise become more efficient – and drive a different, differentiated result.”
