March 17, 2025

The Rise of AI Expert Agents: Revolutionizing Insurance Underwriting

With the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, the term “AI Agents” is quickly gaining traction. Insurance professionals are no strangers to the concept of an agent. Still, they may not be as familiar with AI Agents, how they differ from traditional AI models, and how they can be utilized in their daily tasks, particularly in underwriting. Let’s explore what AI agents are, how they can benefit your workflow without replacing your expertise, and how to get started.

What are AI Agents?
Unlike conventional AI models that simply process data and follow predefined rules, AI agents operate more like real people. They are designed to think and act like a human through decision-making based on the following:

Personas
Their understanding of a given task
Tools available

How AI Agents Reason
AI agents can reason through problems utilizing a framework called ReAct (Reason and Act), which breaks down decision-making into two key steps:

1. Reasoning– The agent analyzes the situation, considers multiple factors, evaluates various possibilities, and determines the best course of action.
2. Action– Based on its reasoning, it executes this action and then reviews the outcome to refine its approach.

These steps continue in a loop, allowing the agent to self-correct, optimize, and improve. This is similar to how a human would work through complex problems, making AI agents useful tools for automating processes in insurance underwriting.

The Impact on Insurance Underwriting
Consider the process an underwriter must go through to review a new business submission. First, they must sort through the numerous unstructured documents that often accompany an application, including loss runs, financial statements, or broker specifications, to understand the risk. Next, they must ensure the submission is complete, contains accurate information, and fits within their appetite. This occurs before they can even start pricing the risk, underwriting, and documenting their findings.

Now, imagine an expert agent taking on these tasks for you. Instead of following a simple if/then workflow, these experienced agents can reason and act, emulating human interactions. This allows them to complete complex tasks that an underwriter would typically be responsible for, such as declining submissions out of appetite, analyzing documents, highlighting missing relevant information, summarizing the risk, identifying the key areas of focus, comparing the submission to current guidelines, recommending terms and conditions for subpar risks, upselling other lines of business, and then documenting the actions taken.

This is the impact of AI agents in the underwriting process. Time-consuming tasks, although necessary, distract underwriters from activities that require their expertise, such as strengthening broker/agent relationships and identifying, mitigating, and appropriately pricing risks. AI agents can alleviate the burden by automating many of these processes, freeing up underwriters to focus on higher-value activities that drive growth.

IntellectAI’s Expert Agents
IntellectAI is revolutionizing the underwriting process with AI expert agents integrated throughout our underwriting ecosystem. Built on our enterprise generative AI platform, Purple Fabric, our agents streamline operations by automating tasks like submission ingestion, data extraction, and initial risk assessment. In addition, underwriters can leverage our AI expert agents in a variety of ways:

Pipeline Management: AI agents can analyze historical submissions against the current underwriting appetite to identify and prioritize high-value leads.
Appetite Matching and Triage: AI agents can identify risk attributes that make a submission unacceptable and automatically decline them, then prioritize submissions with desirable characteristics to the appropriate underwriter.
Prioritization and Linking: AI agents compare submission risk attributes against historical underwriting data and highlight relevant information.
Upsell and Routing: Analyze the attributes of submitted lines of business and notify the appropriate underwriter about potential lines that meet the appetite but were not submitted.
Opportunity Summary: Provides a high-level summary of all exposures and underwriting information to acclimate to an opportunity,
Underwriting Documentation: AI agents can automatically document risk characteristics, proximity to guidelines, third-party summaries, pricing details, and quoted terms and conditions.
Underwriting Copilot: Compares extracted risk attributes from submissions against the carrier’s latest underwriting guidelines. Attributes are categorized into preferred, acceptable, and unacceptable, helping underwriters assess if negative traits can be offset with terms and conditions.
Underwriting Policy Analysis: Ingest underlying policies and identified key terms and conditions, ensuring underwriters are fully aware of the risks they are assuming.

Getting Started
Implementing AI agents into your underwriting team requires a thoughtful approach. To effectively leverage the power of AI agents, insurance organizations should not only foster a culture of data-driven decision-making where underwriters are encouraged to utilize AI but also partner with experienced AI vendors. Choosing a partner with deep expertise in AI and insurance underwriting is imperative to help guide you through this process.

Since the first step in creating an AI expert agent is defining its persona, who better shapes that identity than former underwriters—professionals who truly understand the industry’s complexities, nuances, and decision-making processes? By embedding our expertise into the agent’s ReAct framework, IntellectAI ensures that the agent doesn’t just process data but thinks, evaluates, and acts like seasoned underwriters, making more informed and strategic decisions.

The future of underwriting is not about replacing humans but amplifying them. AI expert agents are the key to unlocking a new era of productivity and strategic focus for your underwriting teams. IntellectAI embraces the collaboration between humans and AI to drive unparalleled results. By welcoming AI agent technology, insurance organizations can unlock new levels of efficiency, improve underwriting accuracy, and enhance the overall customer experience.

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