Scaling Smarter: From M&A Complexity to Intelligent Automation
A leading U.S.-based insurance brokerage firm—offering services in insurance, risk management, employee benefits, and wealth management—had grown rapidly over the past few years. By acquiring multiple regional players, the firm scaled from mid-market revenues to over $1.3 billion in annual revenue. But with growth came fragmentation.
Each acquisition introduced siloed workflows, incompatible systems, and inconsistent data formats. Structured across enterprise advisory, personal lines, and underwriting services, the firm’s operations became increasingly disjointed. The executive leadership aimed to triple revenue over five years. But that vision hinged on a bold pivot: reimagining the organization as the “brokerage of the future,” powered by AI and intelligent automation.
One critical bottleneck stood out: document processing. From carrier quotes to underwriting contracts, operations were flooded with semi-structured, high-variance documents—slowing teams across the enterprise.
With no unified approach to document intake or extraction, teams were mired in manual review. The result? Delayed onboarding, ballooning operational costs, and inconsistent client experience.
Strategic Pivot: From Manual Silos to Document Intelligence
The client partnered with Persistent Systems to build a foundational AI capability for document understanding. The idea wasn’t just to digitize documents—but to decode them.
The solution needed to:
- Automatically classify, extract, and validate information from diverse document types
- Scale across lines of business without extensive reconfiguration
- Integrate seamlessly into policy systems, CRM tools, and case workflows
- Reduce dependency on human analysts while ensuring transparency and compliance
The goal: create a reusable document intelligence platform that would act as a core automation engine for the firm’s future operations.
Engineering the Core: Persistent’s Role
Persistent brought a unique blend of insurance domain knowledge, cloud-native architecture, and AI engineering depth. Key contributions included:
- Use-Case Discovery – Mapped high-friction processes across benefits, underwriting, and consumer insurance to prioritize automation
- Model Development – Prototyped and trained LLM-based extractors using AWS and Azure GPT-4o to ensure model-agnostic architecture.
- Human-in-the-Loop – Ensured precision with review checkpoints and feedback loops
- Scalable Architecture – Built a modular pipeline that supports ingestion, classification, extraction, and downstream integrations. The cloud-agnostic architecture also offers flexibility to migrate.
- Security & Governance – Embedded compliance controls to meet regulated industry standards
Platform in Action: Faster Decisions, Fewer Errors
Since deployment, the platform now:
- Processes hundreds of benefits documents, quotes, and policy forms per day
- Achieves over 95% field-level accuracy on structured extractions
- Reduces analyst effort by 70%
- Delivers 50% reduction in BPO costs for document ingestion, with projected spend decreasing from ~$274K to ~$138K annually.
- Flags edge cases for human review and audit
- Automatically syncs validated outputs with internal systems
What once took hours now takes minutes. Transparency, trust, and turnaround—redefined.
Business Impact: A New Operational Baseline
While the rollout is still expanding, the performance gains are clear:
- 60–70% reduction in turnaround time for core insurance documents
- 40%+ savings in analyst bandwidth across benefits and consumer lines
- Higher data quality fueling faster quoting, onboarding, and underwriting decisions
This isn’t just operational uplift. It’s a reset of what’s possible when insurance workflows are rebuilt around AI.
Why Persistent?
The client needed more than engineers. They needed a transformation partner.
- Insurance Fluency – Deep domain knowledge, process understanding for address nuances
- LLM + Cloud Synergy – Deep capabilities with Azure GPT-4o and AWS via Persistent’s Generative AI Hub
- Platform Thinking – Scaling as enterprise technical capability
- Integrated Delivery – From design to deployment under one roof
Persistent didn’t just deliver a solution—they co-engineered a capability.
What’s Next: From Tool to Strategic Asset
Encouraged by early success, the client is expanding scope:
- New Use Cases – Underwriting memos, broker communications, claims letters
- Enterprise Rollout – Across all three business divisions
- Productization Path – The internal platform is evolving into a full SaaS product (DocuIntel) for the insurance ecosystem
Most notably, the platform is now being productized as a SaaS offering—DocuIntel—targeted at peers across the insurance ecosystem facing similar processing complexity. Persistent continues to support the journey, enabling the client to scale from operational transformation to industry influence—securely and responsibly.
This transformation aligns with the broader industry shifts. As McKinsey notes, “AI-infused automation can reduce insurer operating costs by up to 40%”
Transform How You Work.
Your operations don’t have to slow you down. With AI as the foundation, documents become decisions—and workflows become accelerators.
Reimagine scale. Build with Persistent.
