The Challenge
Digitizing life insurance contracts offers significant benefits for insurance companies by enhancing data accessibility and efficiency, improving accuracy and consistency, and enabling advanced data analysis. This streamlining leads to better customer service, quicker decision-making, and richer business intelligence. Our customer, a major insurance company, needed an efficient solution for migrating unstructured data from more than 20,000 legacy customer contracts – some dating back as far as the 1940s – into a structured, easily usable digital format. The document basis varied in length from 200 to 3,000 pages each, containing email communication, contracts, amendments, and more. Due to their wide variability, the unstructured form of the contracts made it difficult and time-consuming to capture essential data, such as who is paying for the policy, and retrieve key information.
The approach
Eraneos first gained a comprehensive understanding of the client’s needs. Processing life insurance contracts by hand had proven extremely time-consuming for our customer in the past: manually migrating just one contract could take a single employee anywhere from half an hour to a full day of work. Given the large number of contracts, completing this task manually could take years. The Eraneos team got to work developing a Generative AI solution to accelerate migration and information retrieval of the documents. The tool our team developed drastically reduces this time, enhancing efficiency and productivity. It took only three months to complete the project, from kick-off to delivery.
Given the age and format variability of the documents, the Eraneos project team decided to use a multi-model combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Referred Visual Search (RVS) and advanced generative AI models. In addition to OpenAI’s GPT, the Eraneos team chose to incorporate Amazon Textract. As an AWS partner, Eraneos offers the expertise to fully leverage the capabilities of Textract, a machine learning text interpretation tool that is part of Amazon’s suite of cloud computing services. All the chosen technologies work together to extract and interpret complex images (such as digitized written texts), thus converting them into structured, verifiable data. When the user needs to locate information from one of the thousands of documents, the AI assists in finding the relevant sections within the documents and displays the results in a web app’s front end. On the back end, our solution reviews the vast dataset and instantly provides the user with the most appropriate suggestions, along with exact coordinates (page number and page position) to show where the information comes from. It also identifies which version of the document appears to be the most up-to-date, helping the user to avoid outdated information.
Manually processing more than 20,000 contracts would have taken the customer anywhere from half an hour to a full day per contract, potentially stretching the task out over years.
Among the key benefits of our AI-powered solution is that it is a “human-in-the-loop” system. This means that a human employee has final review and decision-making authority over all the tool’s output as opposed to the tool being a fully automated solution. This approach ensures that while the AI handles the bulk of data processing and preliminary analysis, critical decisions, especially those involving complex or ambiguous information, benefit from expert human judgment. This not only enhances accuracy but also builds trust in the AI system, as staff can directly verify and correct outputs. This method significantly reduces the risk of errors, making it a robust solution for managing sensitive insurance data. As the customer is based in the EU, it is subject to GDPR regulations. To ensure compliance, our team used OpenAI via Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure hosted within EU data centers.
Our customer is a major insurance company in the process of digitally transforming their data management. By migrating thousands of paper documents to structured digital data, the company is making a major step towards enhancing data accessibility and streamlining decision-making processes that affect its customers.
The result
The tool delivered by Eraneos significantly speeds up the migration of large volumes of unstructured data into a structured format, enabling our customer to move faster. Manually processing more than 20,000 contracts would have taken the customer several years. During trials, staff members who previously managed contract data manually were impressed and satisfied with the new tool, especially because of its potential to reduce the amount of time they spend reading lengthy, complex documents. We expect a realized time reduction of about 30-50%, depending on the respective contract complexity.
The AI tool effectively interprets contract information from up to 80 data fields, delivering high accuracy in its outputs. It provides our customer with an effective solution for transforming a vast amount of historical data into a valuable digital asset. In addition to streamlining the digitization process, the tool ensures data integrity and ease of access to the migrated data. By enabling quick validations against original documents, the tool empowers the customer’s staff to make accurate decisions swiftly. This project paves the way for similar future transformations within the insurance sector and beyond, demonstrating the significant benefits of integrating AI into document management systems.