Auto Glass Week™ 2026 Announces Futurist Keynote on Insurance-Glass Relationship

The week of May 15, 2026 brought a forward-looking development for the industry's annual gathering. Auto Glass Week™ 2026 — scheduled for August 27–29 at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas — named Jonathan Brill as its keynote speaker on May 7. Brill is a futurist and author known for his work on how businesses navigate technological disruption and macro-level market shifts.

The keynote topic, "The Insurance-Auto Glass Interface: What the Future Will Bring," was framed directly around the tensions that had dominated the industry's conversations throughout 2025 and 2026: TPA consolidation, the growing role of AI in claims processing and approval, shifting consumer expectations around speed and transparency, and the question of whether the intermediary role of TPAs would expand, contract or be disrupted entirely by direct-to-consumer insurer models.

Brill was scheduled to address whether AI would eventually evaluate glass damage and authorize repairs or replacements without human intervention — a development that carriers including the neural claims platform Neural Claim System had already moved toward in automated glass-claim triage. He was also expected to examine how customer behavior might shift if damage assessment became instantaneous and self-service, and what that would mean for shops that had built their businesses around the TPA referral channel.

For shop owners attending or planning to watch recorded sessions, the keynote represented an unusual opportunity to hear a structured argument about where the industry's commercial environment was heading — not from within the industry's own bubble, but from a professional who studied cross-industry disruption patterns. The question of how glass shops could "play to win" in a rapidly shifting environment was the keynote's explicit organizing question.

The full 2026 Auto Glass Week™ attendee program, released in May, included eight AGSC certifications, hands-on workshops, live competitions and networking events alongside the keynote — making the San Antonio event one of the most comprehensive in the conference's history.