By Pat Corless, SVP & Global Chief Enterprise Architect, ACORD
If you read any amount of insurance industry press, you’ll conclude that Agentic AI is a major disruptor to the industry’s lifecycles – streamlining workflows and automating traditionally manual, inefficient processes. In short, it has the potential to enact radical change. If AI has the power to create such a radically different status quo, it surely must require a radically new data model to describe its work, right?
Actually, it doesn’t. Here’s our hot take: Data structures don’t need a total reinvention to represent AI.
At ACORD, we’ve been relentlessly thinking about modeling insurance data and processes for 50+ years. How do you squeeze 40 diverse P&C lines of business into one data structure that is as common as possible, but allows wide variation? How do you finagle insurance policies and annuity contracts and reinsurance treaties and facultative certificates in a similar representation? What does “coverage” really mean? How do you capture financial transactions that are both understandable and acceptable to the worldwide variety of insurance carriers, brokers, and regulators?
Here’s the surprising finding to us – while AI may require reinvention in technology stacks and governance principles, it’s only a matter of a little evolution for data storage. Our latest update to the ACORD Reference Architecture now represents AI-enabled insurance processes without introducing an entirely new model.
We know what you’re thinking. “AI is an entirely new technology. How is that possible?”
Here’s the major core of our theory: AI agents and human participants work within the same task structure. With specific updates, existing ACORD Reference Architecture constructs can describe AI-enabled work alongside human activity in a consistent, technology-neutral way. This flexibility allows insurers to show where an AI agent participates in a process, the activities it performs, the information it evaluates, the outcomes it produces, as well as areas still needing human intervention. Handoffs between a human employee and an “agentic employee” are not fundamentally different than handoffs between two human employees.
That means the underlying data structures currently empowering digital exchange processes already have the fundamentals needed to support both real-life teammates as well as virtual teammates – including Agentic AI. All they require are some specialized revisions to differentiate AI and human work. No reinventing the wheel – just evolution.
That’s because at its core, AI isn’t radically reinventing insurance industry lifecycles or workflows. It’s accelerating critical components within digital processes, seamlessly orchestrating and automating existing tasks across systems.
Since underlying data structures only need to expand to address AI, they’re already capable of delivering one of the industry’s most pressing business needs: governed automation with human oversight. Our most recent ACORD Reference Architecture release establishes how AI enablement can remain governed, explainable, and traceable within the same information architecture used for traditional, human-only insurance processes.
The result: Workflows that stay on the cutting-edge… and a deep sigh of relief from insurance teams everywhere.
See the updates for yourself. Check out the ACORD Reference Architecture at www.acord.org/RA.