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4 minute read
If you're part of an underwriting team, you've likely experienced the drag of a slow submission intake process. Submissions arrive by email as spreadsheets, scanned PDFs, and sometimes, notes in the body of the email itself. None of it is standardized. Every time a new submission comes in, someone must stop what they're doing, open attachments, interpret the format, and start cleaning it up manually before it's ready to quote.
While this is part of the job for many in the industry, it's also become a hidden cost, delaying time to quote and resulting in missed opportunities.
In this blog, we'll look at why submission triage remains a bottleneck for underwriters and how solutions like Brisc's AI-powered Submissions Agent are helping insurance teams solve this problem quickly, and without having to change the way they work.
Key Takeaways
- Submission triage remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in insurance underwriting.
- Most submissions arrive in messy, unstructured formats that require hours of manual work.
- Brisc's AI Submissions Agent turns those submissions into structured, quote-ready data in ~60 seconds — with no integration or workflow disruption.
- Underwriting teams can save time, increase quote volume, and prioritize the best risks instantly.
- You can go live in a day and start seeing value from the first submission.
The Submission Intake Problem Isn't New — But It's Getting Worse
Even in 2025, submissions still arrive like they did a decade ago. Brokers send emails with spreadsheets, PDFs, scanned files, or Word documents. Sometimes, the data lives across multiple files. Often, there's no standard naming convention or structure.
Underwriters and operations teams are stuck cleaning up the mess. They copy and paste data into rating tools, hunt for missing fields, cross-reference internal systems, and often return to brokers to ask clarifying questions. All of this takes time—sometimes hours—and in high-volume environments, those hours add up quickly.
Beyond the impact on productivity, there's also the strategic cost. When underwriters are tied up with manual triage, they're not quoting, prioritizing the best risks, moving quickly enough to win competitive opportunities, and not doing the kind of high-value work that actually grows the business.
Why Unstructured Data Is the Core Challenge
At the heart of the problem is the unstructured nature of submission data.
Processes are different from broker to broker. One might send an Excel file with tabs for each location. Another might send a single-page PDF summary without labels. Some will include everything in a long email thread with attachments scattered across replies.
There is no universal format. That means systems can't ingest this information automatically, and underwriters are forced to act as translators. They parse file structures, interpret language, and try to organize everything into something their rating engine or underwriting system can use.
In a market where talent is already stretched thin, manually going through submissions is just not sustainable.
What a Better Process Looks Like
Now imagine this: You receive a submission email, and instead of downloading files and digging through documents, you forward it to a dedicated email address. A minute later, you receive structured data back, cleaned, organized, and mapped to the fields your underwriters need.
There’s no new system to learn and no integration required to get started. Once submitted, the data is processed and made available. You can review, interrogate, and validate the data — or push it into your systems when you're ready. You get the insights you need to underwrite, without changing the way you work.
Brisc makes this possible by changing how forward-thinking underwriting teams handle submission triage.
Meet Brisc's AI Submissions Agent
Brisc's AI Submissions Agent is a background worker explicitly built for the insurance industry. It doesn't require you to change your workflows or systems. You email in your submissions, and the agent handles the rest.
Here's how it works:
- When you email a submission, Brisc picks up the message and processes every attachment, including PDFs, Excel files, CSVs, Word documents, and even the content in the email body itself.
- The agent extracts the data. Using Brisc's AI document processing tools, it reads both structured and unstructured content, understands the context, and extracts the fields you care about for underwriting.
- You get structured, quote-ready data back—tailored to your workflows, mapped to your fields, and ready for your underwriters to take action on.
All of this takes about 60 seconds per submission. It works out of the box with zero integration, no code, and no IT bottlenecks. And it can be up and running in under 24 hours.
Brisc doesn't just process the data. It understands the priorities of your business. That means the output can include not just the raw fields but also prioritized opportunities based on your underwriting criteria — giving your team a running start on the quotes that matter most.
What Makes Brisc Different
Many tools promise to digitize underwriting; however, most require lengthy onboarding, complex integrations with internal systems, or training on a new portal.
Brisc takes a different approach. It makes your data available in an intuitive dashboard or through email. You can review, ask questions, and validate data — all without disrupting your team’s current workflow. When you’ve validated submission data, you can push it directly into your own system with the click of a button.
The Submissions Agent is also incredibly fast. You can go live in 24 hours, with many teams implementing in less than 2 weeks. And once it's live, turnaround time per submission drops from hours to minutes. It's also highly flexible. Whether your submissions come in clean or not, Brisc can handle them.
Most importantly, it's secure. Your data stays in your environment. Brisc connects to it safely and never uses your information to train external models.
What This Means for Underwriting Teams
The benefits are measurable and immediate:
- Save hours per submission by eliminating manual cleanup.
- Increase quote volume without hiring more staff.
- Respond faster to broker submissions and win more deals.
- Prioritize intelligently by surfacing the most promising opportunities first.
- Avoid IT delays thanks to a simple setup.
Ready to Try It?
You don't need to rip out systems or retrain your team. Just forward a submission to Brisc and get everything you need to bind more policies.
There's no portal or complex onboarding. Fast, reliable results help you quote quicker and win more business.
Get started in under 24 hours. See it in action and book a demo.