Tackling Unstructured Data in Insurance: Why AI is Different

After years of failed promises, AI is finally delivering a real solution to unstructured data, manual work, and disconnected systems.

In insurance and reinsurance, unstructured data has long been one of the industry’s most intractable problems. It’s everywhere — buried in PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, and attachments — and it can’t flow cleanly between systems. The same information gets rekeyed again and again across platforms. People become the glue, manually stitching together workflows that are slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale.

Anyone who’s worked in the industry knows this pain firsthand. The challenge has always been finding a solution that actually works.

Today’s AI models offer a fundamentally better solution — one that can reliably handle problems that have resisted scalable answers for decades.

We’ve Tried to Solve It Before

If you’re skeptical about AI’s efficacy, I don’t blame you. Technology has promised to fix these issues for years, and hasn't delivered.

• Document Standards like ACORD and Lloyd's Core Data Record have aimed to create structure, but adoption has been inconsistent across carriers, brokers, and reinsurers.
• Marketplace Portals were built to centralize submissions and data exchange (e.g., PPL in London market), but added another interface and format to manage — increasing complexity, not reducing it.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools and macros tried to automate data entry, but these are brittle, require constant maintenance, and can't adapt to changes in document structure.

Many insurance organizations still rely on these tools today, especially RPA and document templates, but they function more like band-aids than cures.

So, why do they ultimately fall short? 

1. No universal format: Each carrier or broker tweaks templates and systems, preventing true standardization.
2. Limited flexibility: Legacy automation doesn't handle variation or ambiguity well.
3. Manual effort is still needed: These tools only shift the manual effort, rather than eliminating it.

AI is Different

We now have tools that can genuinely solve the long-standing unstructured data problem.

Modern AI — specifically large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and document intelligence models — can interpret messy, unstructured or semi-structured inputs and extract structured meaning.

These models don't require rigid templates. They adapt to varied formats and infer context.

Key advantages with AI:

• Flexibility: Works across document types — slips, quotes, bordereaux, policies — even when layouts vary.
• Resilience: Doesn't break when a field moves from page 2 to page 3.
• Scalability: Can be trained and scaled across lines of business, significantly reducing human upkeep.

For the first time, we can reliably solve a problem that has persisted for decades.

Why It Starts with Automation and Integration

Before we get to dashboards, analytics, or predictive models, we have to start with the foundation: automation and integration.

That means:

• Ingesting unstructured data from emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets.
• Reducing human input with AI-powered data extraction.
• Connecting systems — policy admin, claims, underwriting, reporting — so data can flow automatically.

This is the most practical and high-impact starting point for transformation — and where AI can drive immediate value.

What’s Next?

For the first time, we have a real, reliable way to solve one of the industry's biggest challenges.

AI has shifted the equation from “maybe someday” to real-world pilots and deployments — with proven results. It gives us the ability to handle messy data, reduce human effort, and modernize the foundation of insurance operations.

Starting with automation and integration builds the foundation for everything else to follow and creates real operational momentum.

Once data flows automatically, the next frontier is real-time visibility and insight. 

In the next piece, we'll explore how clean, structured data powers advanced analytics, improves underwriting decisions, and unlocks new business intelligence across insurance workflows.

Drowning in PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets?
Brisc turns unstructured data into actionable insights across submissions, bordereaux, and claims workflows. 

Book a demo to see it in action.