How Emerging Technology is Changing Insurance, Liability, and Business Risk

Last year, our Future of Risk series explored how today's greatest business risks no longer exist in isolation. Cyber threats, workforce disruption, supply chain volatility, business continuity, and executive liability have become increasingly interconnected, creating systemic exposures organizations need to plan for holistically. Those risks haven't gone away, but a new force is intensifying each of them.

Across Brown & Brown's 2026 Market Trends Report, one theme surfaced repeatedly: emerging technologies are reshaping industries faster than businesses, regulators, and insurers can adapt. From AI and automation to advanced aviation and digital entertainment technologies, we are seeing a broad shift toward increasingly autonomous, data-driven, and interconnected systems.

While these innovations present tremendous opportunity, they also introduce new exposures and questions that legal precedent and claims history can't yet answer. That uncertainty affects risk management and insurance planning.

This new Future of Risk series explores five major shifts every organization is facing and how to prepare.

How emerging technology is reshaping organizational risk

Organizations today are investing in artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, robotics, autonomous systems, advanced aviation technologies such as drones and eVTOL aircraft, and AI-powered content and decision-making tools.

In the second quarter of 2026, Google’s parent company Alphabet spent $44.9 billion, almost entirely at AI infrastructure for its cloud and AI businesses. This is just one example of massive investments in the AI race.

While each innovation offers opportunities to improve efficiency and create competitive advantage, it also introduces new risk considerations that extend beyond the technology itself.

How existing risks are becoming more complex

Rather than creating entirely new categories of exposure, these technologies are amplifying many of the systemic risks organizations already manage:

• Cybersecurity grows more complex as AI strengthens both defensive capabilities and cyberattacks

• Business continuity increasingly depends on automated systems and digital infrastructure

• Executive liability expands as boards become responsible for overseeing AI governance and technology strategy

• Manufacturing involves new dependencies on software and third-party vendors

• Professional liability evolves as AI begins influencing legal, financial, and healthcare decisions

In this landscape, the greatest emerging risk today may not be a specific technology, but the uncertainty these technologies are creating.

Why insurance frameworks are evolving alongside emerging technology

Traditionally, insurance relies on historical loss experience. Courts establish precedents, regulators develop standards, and underwriters gradually refine pricing. The pace of technological development and adoption today is compressing that timeline dramatically.

Now, organizations are implementing AI before claims patterns are fully understood. New technologies are entering commercial markets before governance frameworks have matured. Carriers are evaluating exposures with limited historical data, and businesses are increasingly uncertain about how future losses may be covered.

The result is a rapidly widening gap between technological innovation and established insurance frameworks. Recently, there has been a substantial uptick in AI-related claims. This is significant since carriers have been talking about AI claim exposure for several years without seeing much actual loss activity. Without those losses, insurers are still asking fundamental questions: Which policy responds to an AI claim? How will emerging technologies influence future underwriting?

Early AI-related claims across regulated industries

Those questions don't yet have consistent answers, and that's the challenge. Thus far, the sectors where insurers are seeing the earliest technology-related claims include healthcare, law, manufacturing, technology, and financial services. Adoption is already widespread in these areas, and they are heavily regulated.

Within those verticals, the most common claims emerging are:

• AI-hallucinated cases submitted in lawyer briefs

• AI-assisted prescriptions recommendations and medical documentation in healthcare

• Intellectual property disputes

• Copyright infringement

• AI-generated content

• Technology errors and omissions (E&O)

• Employment-related litigation

• AI-enabled cyber events

• Errors by autonomous systems in manufacturing resulting in injury or loss

How silent AI exposure may affect existing policies

As claims begin working their way through courts and carriers gain more real-world experience, policy language, underwriting expectations, and coverage approaches will continue to evolve. Some carriers refer to this as the “silent AI” problem, meaning AI has not been properly defined in a policy so an AI claim today will most likely land squarely inside an existing liability policy.

How emerging technology is complicating liability

As technology becomes more autonomous, accountability is more complex. Traditionally, determining liability was often straightforward. If a product failed or an employee made an error, investigators worked to determine what happened, who was responsible, and which insurance policies might respond. Emerging technologies blur those lines.

Organizations are already seeing new questions emerge around customer service chatbots, autonomous decision-support systems, intelligent manufacturing technologies, and increasingly sophisticated third-party AI vendors.

AI-related losses can involve multiple areas of liability

Recent litigation involving AI-powered hiring platforms, growing concerns around shadow AI (employees’ unauthorized use of AI), evolving vendor relationships, and increased attention to directors and officers (D&O) liability all point to the same reality: determining responsibility is becoming more complicated. One single AI-generated loss can create multiple cross-functional losses in E&O, cyber insurance, product liability, physical damage, and bodily injury simultaneously.

Questions organizations face when determining AI liability

When an incident involving AI or another emerging technology occurs, organizations will increasingly find themselves asking:

• Did the technology fail?

• Did employees misuse or over-rely on it?

• Did the vendor adequately disclose its limitations?

• Were sufficient governance and human oversight in place?

• Should responsibility rest with the developer, the vendor, or the organization using the technology?

The answers to those questions won't just determine liability. Over time, they'll also influence how insurers evaluate coverage, interpret policy language, and underwrite future risks.

Why human judgment remains central to technology risk management

Emerging technology is transforming how people work, but it isn't eliminating the need for human judgment. In many cases, it is making that judgment even more important. As organizations integrate AI and other intelligent technologies into everyday operations, they're asking these questions:

• How should employees use AI?

• What governance is needed for emerging technology?

• Where should human review remain mandatory?

• As AI increasingly performs routine work, how do organizations confirm employees have the skills to recognize when something is not right?

Human oversight and workforce readiness for AI

The answers to these questions directly influence risk and liability. Beyond productivity gains, adopting emerging technology requires organizations to think differently about governance, decision oversight, ethical responsibility, and workforce development. Employees need new skills to evaluate AI-generated outputs, understand where automation should and shouldn't be applied, and exercise sound judgment when technology reaches its limits.

Technology governance as an executive risk

For leadership teams, these issues increasingly represent executive risk. Decisions about how AI is deployed, monitored, and governed can influence legal exposure, regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and corporate reputation. As emerging technology becomes embedded throughout the enterprise, leadership is just as responsible for oversight as IT.

How AI is changing insurance underwriting and claims management

Emerging technology is changing insurance itself. Across the industry, carriers are increasingly adopting AI and advanced analytics to improve underwriting, streamline claims handling, and support more informed decision-making.

AI-assisted underwriting, claims and risk modeling

AI-assisted underwriting, claims automation, predictive analytics, fraud detection, reserve modeling, and claims analytics are quickly becoming part of everyday insurance operations. AI-supported “first notice of loss” systems can help triage incoming claims more efficiently, while predictive models improve reserve accuracy and legal professionals within the insurance industry increasingly leverage AI to accelerate research.

These capabilities also reflect a broader shift in how risk is evaluated. As more insurance companies adopt AI models to predict risk, the industry will have to reckon with a fundamental change in how carriers underwrite and determine premiums and rates. What will it look like when insurers are relying on predictive models instead of claims history to determine rates and model risk? Time will tell; but new challenges, regulations, pricing adjustments, cost structures, and underwriting requirements are likely to emerge.

How technology governance may influence underwriting conversations

As insurers become more sophisticated users of advanced technology, they're asking more questions of policyholders.

Organizations need to expect discussions around technology governance, operational controls, vendor management, cyber resilience, and risk documentation. Underwriting conversations expand beyond traditional financial and operational considerations to include how organizations deploy, oversee, and manage AI and other emerging technologies across the business. Additionally, businesses may need to develop their own AI predictive models that support their risk story for carriers.

Business leaders need a strategy focused on building resilience. Perhaps most importantly, organizations that communicate how they manage emerging technology risk will likely fare better as underwriting practices mature, regulatory expectations evolve, and litigation establishes new precedent.

What the Future of Risk series will examine next

In the months ahead, we'll explore how AI and other emerging technologies are reshaping liability and enterprise risk, and what organizations can do today to strengthen governance, improve insurability, and build resilience.

We hope you'll join us.