The industry’s annual Dive In festival was held worldwide last week, with insurance experts applauding the theme Belonging Builds Tomorrow. 

“I love this year’s theme and I don’t think anybody could argue against it,” AIG Australia CEO Kathleen Warden told local attendees.

“It puts a spotlight on the role that everyone in every organisation plays in creating environments where people feel valued, they feel heard and able to succeed.”

But not all efforts to foster diversity have found universal support this year.  

The US government cut its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and corporate giants have wound back targets, and the opening session of Dive In in London was met with protests and accusations of “hypocrisy” over the underwriting of fossil fuel projects and arms manufacturers.

In its 11th year, the festival’s tagline was, for the first time, not “diversity and inclusion” but “culture and talent”.

But a spokeswoman insists “diversity and inclusion remains foundational” and there is no change to the festival’s focus.

“By using the tagline culture and talent this year, the Dive In stakeholders were aiming to highlight how diversity and inclusion connects with broader business goals – culture transformation and talent retention,” she told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“The [2025] campaign has spotlighted where colleagues feel they most belong and how that sense of belonging drives more effective and efficient ways of working.”

The highlights from local Dive In events

At a session called Intergenerational Inclusion 2.0, Insurance Council of Australia deputy CEO Kylie Macfarlane said the industry faces a “demographic cliff”, with 30% of its workers in Australia in line to retire by 2030.

She said recruitment efforts must begin at schools and the “trade models” of apprenticeships and cadetships should be more common in insurance.

“We need to ... find atypical pathways for people to join our industry,” she said. “Nobody actually knows that they could or should go and work in insurance, and that’s a real challenge.

“There are a lot of jobs within the insurance industry that don’t require a degree and can give you a pathway to ‘learn and earn’ along the way. You're actually working and getting hands-on learning at the same time.

“We need to be looking at building a workforce that reflects our society and our community ... A big part of that is about saying to people, ‘Hey, insurance is actually sexy. You should come and work for us. We have lots of different careers. You don’t need to be a mathematician or an actuary to be here, but you will have a purposeful career’.”

At Masking to Mastery: ADHD in the Workplace it was revealed that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder costs the Australian economy about $20 billion a year, affecting productivity, staff absenteeism, employee wellbeing and organisational culture.

Kim Singline, a psychologist, revealed she was diagnosed with ADHD last year and “didn’t even realise I was masking”.  

“It’s been so good to find out. I feel like I’ve got the guidebook for my brain ... [and] to work with organisations to help all brains thrive,” she said.  

“If you create a truly inclusive environment ... the studies show that performance, engagement, all of the things you want, are maximised. There’s no downside to it.”

At Building High-Performing Teams Through Belonging, Aon head of national Alison Smith said to belong is a “primal human need” and a workplace culture lacking belonging is “so much more obvious than when it’s present”.

“Mistakes are punished, your ideas are shot down, speaking up is risky. Then nobody takes a chance, nobody comes to you with innovations, nobody comes together ... They kind of just clock in, do their stuff and move on because they’re too afraid to be able to grow and learn,” Ms Smith said.

“When you’re feeling kind of outside of the circle, you feel more disengaged, but when you’re part of it, you feel like you want to give your best. So creating that psychological safety – not shutting people’s ideas down, not punishing mistakes – does create an environment where people are more innovative.”

At The future of AI and Work, Steadfast director of AI and emerging technology Steven Tuften said AI can either amplify or dampen systemic bias across society.

“It depends on how we use it and what AI technology we use and deploy, and this is an important consideration,” he said.  

Models used by generative AI rely on data sets with both trusted and untrusted data, he said. 

“We have biased and non-biased information. We have facts, misinformation, we have bias, and so the good, the bad, the ugly of the internet, and because of that training, these models just reinforce those biases.  

“So we can’t always trust the output ... there’s still a risk that you may get hate speech, violence, inequity or discrimination out of these language models.”