5 things we heard at NSIPA New Orleans
NSIPA 2026 was our first time at the seminar. Two days at the Royal Sonesta, about 100 conversations, and a lot of macarons. We left with a notebook full of themes that surprised us.
Here are five that kept coming up. If you were there, this is a recap of the hallway track. If you weren't, here's what your peers are actually talking about right now.
1. "Garbage in" is everyone's biggest fight — not the audit itself
Every single carrier audit lead we spoke with mentioned bad inbound data before they mentioned anything about audit execution. Wrong contacts. Missing quarterly docs. Agents who only respond when a renewal premium spikes.
The conversation has shifted from "how do we make audits faster" to "how do we stop wasting auditor time on chase work." That's a meaningful reframe. Productivity gains aren't about cranking through more audits per hour; they're about making the auditor's hour count on judgment work instead of data wrangling.
2. Hybrid (in-house + vendor) teams are the default, not the exception
We lost count of "we have nine internal auditors and use vendors" or "we have 55 auditors and most work is outsourced." Pure-internal and pure-outsourced were both rare.
The hard part isn't choosing one model or the other. It's running both like a single workflow instead of two parallel ones — visibility into vendor productivity, consistent SLA, unified data. Many leaders we spoke with are quietly looking for something that treats vendor and internal teams as one queue.
3. The AI-replacement fear is real and worth taking seriously
"Why would you need an auditor then?" came up in at least three separate conversations. Even people excited about AI worry about which slice of their job disappears.
We think the vendors who win this decade are the ones positioning AI as augmentation — the auditor as pilot, the AI as co-pilot — rather than as a headcount-reduction story. Premium audit requires judgment under ambiguity, and that's not going away. The right framing isn't "what does AI replace" but "what does it free the auditor to do that they don't have time for today."
4. Contractor economics are flipping productivity from a cost into a feature
One of the more interesting conversations was with a carrier where most auditors are 1099 contractors. Their POV: every productivity gain goes straight into the auditor's pocket. Adoption isn't a fight — auditors compete to use the better tool because faster audits mean higher income.
This changes the math on what "buying" a platform really costs. On a salaried team, productivity has to fight against change resistance. On a contractor team, productivity is the carrot. If you're running a hybrid model, the contractor side may be where you pilot anything new.
5. The "need new tools" conversation has started
Everyone is being asked to do more with less. Auditors are stretched thin and being asked to handle higher inventory without compromising quality.
If any of these landed, we'd love to compare notes. Reply, or grab time on our contact page — we're talking with carriers and vendors of every size right now, and we always learn something.
And if you want to see how AuditCake takes the chase work out of audits — 80%+ productivity with the same headcount — our product page walks through how the platform actually runs.