Cyber and AI in the Insurance Industry

Cyber and AI in the Insurance Industry

RECORDED october 13, 2026

AI is helping businesses work faster, but it’s also helping cybercriminals launch attacks faster, at greater scale and with more convincing results. For independent insurance agents, understanding AI-driven cyber risk is increasingly important both for protecting their own agencies and for helping commercial clients understand exposures they may not realize they have.

In this Agency AI Labs conversation, Anthony Rushton of Coalition and independent agent David Carothers discuss how AI is changing phishing, business email compromise, fraud, impersonation and other cyber threats. They explore how criminals are using AI to create more convincing emails, mimic trusted individuals and vendors, scale attacks and move through compromised systems more quickly. The session also shares a real-world business email compromise example in which attackers monitored communications, intercepted invoices and redirected payments.

Watch to explore questions like:

• How is AI changing phishing and business email compromise?
• Why are AI-generated emails and impersonation attempts harder to recognize?
• How could deepfake voice or video be used to impersonate executives, clients or vendors?
• Are small and midsized businesses really targets for AI-enabled cybercrime?
• What verification steps can agencies and their clients put in place for financial transactions?
• What should independent agents know about AI-related cyber insurance coverage?
• Is it safe to put client information into ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools?
• What’s the difference between free public AI tools and more secure business environments?
• How can agents use AI with commercial client information without unnecessarily increasing cyber risk?

The panel also looks at the opportunity side of AI. David Carothers demonstrates how AI can turn information such as loss runs into sophisticated risk-management insights and reporting, while Anthony Rushton stresses the need to protect sensitive client information through appropriate security controls, paid or closed AI environments and data scrubbing when possible.

For independent agents, the takeaway is twofold: AI can create powerful new capabilities for serving and educating clients, but the same technology also changes the cyber threats those clients and agencies need to recognize and manage.