Last week’s symposium in Hartford brought together a dynamic mix of industry leaders to discuss some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing insurance today. Held over two days, the event featured participants from leading insurance carriers, global consultancies, and innovative InsurTechs—including experts in data, analytics, underwriting, and digital transformation. A special thank you to our roundtable speakers for sharing their insights and experience—it sparked some truly engaging and thought-provoking discussions.
The GenAI Advantage:
Turning Documents into Insights for Commercial Insurers
The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the insurance industry at a pace few could have predicted. Tasks that once demanded hours of manual review and deep domain expertise—like interpreting complex policy documents, underwriting submissions, or broker slips—can now be executed in minutes with remarkable accuracy. But as the hype around GenAI continues to build, it’s critical for insurers to move beyond fascination and start focusing on how AI informs action, drives accountability, and aligns with long-term business and regulatory realities.
GenAI Accelerates Analysis—But What Comes Next?
The initial impact of GenAI has been undeniably positive. Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of reading and understanding vast amounts of insurance content—slips, binders, claims narratives—and extracting valuable insights with little human intervention. This is revolutionizing underwriting support, claims triage, compliance checks, and more.
But acceleration alone isn’t enough. The true value of GenAI lies not in what it can read, but in what it enables insurers to do next. Insights must be translated into decisions and automated processes that support strategic objectives, operational efficiency, and customer outcomes.
Informing Action Without Losing Control
GenAI can help insurers uncover patterns, detect anomalies, and flag inconsistencies faster than any human team. However, these insights must be actionable—and trusted. In the world of insurance, where risk appetite and regulatory constraints define the boundaries of decision-making, human oversight and decision control remain non-negotiable.
Underwriters and claims professionals must remain in the loop, able to review, validate, and override AI-generated recommendations when needed. Insurers must embed their own business logic, rules, and reference data into AI workflows to ensure outputs are not only accurate but also aligned with internal policies and compliance requirements.
Avoiding Lock-In: The Case for LLM Independence
As powerful as today’s LLMs are, the ecosystem is still evolving rapidly. New models are emerging monthly, each with different strengths, limitations, and licensing terms. Locking your business into a single provider—or relying on a closed, black-box model—introduces unnecessary risk.
Carriers and Brokers need the flexibility to work across multiple LLMs, choosing the right model for the task at hand, whether it’s open source, fine-tuned, or proprietary. A model-agnostic approach also allows insurers to maintain control of their intellectual property, training data, and decision pipelines—ensuring long-term adaptability as technology and regulations continue to evolve.
Regulators Are Watching—and Holding Firms Accountable
Perhaps the most important point of all: regulators aren’t focused on the technology behind the decision. They’re focused on who is responsible for the outcome.
National regulators and international watchdogs are making it clear that accountability for AI decisions lies with the firm—not the model, not the vendor, and not the machine. Insurers must demonstrate governance, auditability, and explainability in every AI-driven process. It’s not enough to say, “the AI made that decision.” Firms must be able to show how that decision was reached, why it was accepted, and who owns the outcome.
Bringing It All Together
At Insurants, we believe GenAI is a powerful enabler—but only when used responsibly. That’s why we design our AI solutions, like Submission Processing, with transparency, decision control, and model flexibility built in. We help insurers transform manual processes into intelligent workflows, while ensuring they stay compliant, in control, and ready for the future.
GenAI will keep getting smarter. The key is making sure your business does too.
