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New AI Features to Raise the Bar on Underwriting Efficiency
Feature Release

New AI Features to Raise the Bar on Underwriting Efficiency

We’ve enhanced our commercial underwriting platform with a suite of AI-powered features that streamline end-to-end underwriting across all lines of business.

5 min read
Lana Jovanovic

With our latest product updates, we’ve extended our commercial underwriting product with a suite of AI-powered features to facilitate end-to-end underwriting across all lines of business, scaling from transactional underwriting to complex, three-dimensional risks.

Sixfold’s number one superpower is to easily–and quickly–ingest carriers’ unique underwriting guidelines and automatically surface the submissions that match the carrier’s unique risk appetite. The platform empowers carriers to streamline the underwriting process by:

🔘 Analyzing publicly available information and ingesting data from multiple disparate sources in an instant for a comprehensive risk assessment

🔘 Generating a comprehensive summarization of the business’s operations and providing NAICS/SIC classification

🔘 Surfacing positive and negative risk factors tuned to a carrier’s unique appetite

🔘 Answering complex questions across large sets of documents

🔘 Prioritizing risks with an underwriter-facing dashboard for improved resource allocation

Over the past half, we’ve significantly matured our P&C underwriting platform with deep investments across accuracy, traceability, performance, and extensibility. Some of the key highlights include:

✔️ Improved Accuracy with Advanced Document Extraction  

As underwriters ask complex questions across large sets of documents, we’ve invested in new models to improve extraction across the universe of insurance documents. With Sixfold’s latest models, we’ve seen a 40% boost in accuracy in extracting data from the most illegible documents.

With our ongoing investments in extraction models tailored to the documents underwriters see daily, Sixfold ensures precise and reliable insights from large, challenging document sets, transforming how underwriters interact with data.

Sixfold ensures precise and reliable insights from large, challenging document sets; transforming how underwriters interact with data.

✔️ Appetite Match Scoring with Weighted Risk Scoring

To replicate underwriters’ cognitive processes, Sixfold is introducing weighted risk signals to reflect the nuance across how underwriting factors impact where a risk sits within a carrier’s appetite. Now, carriers can assign varying importance to different factors to prioritize risks more accurately based on alignment with their risk appetite.

A carrier can assign varying importance to different factors to prioritize risks more accurately based on alignment with their risk appetite.

✔️ Enhanced Transparency with Inline Citations

Not only can Sixfold answer complex questionnaires across lines of business, but now all answers are grounded in the original source material with citations to the most relevant sections for confident decision-making.

All answers are grounded in the original source material with citations to the most relevant sections for confident decisioning.

✔️ Bringing Risk Classification and Summarization Down to Seconds

With our continued commitment to investing in the Sixfold pipeline architecture to improve performance, availability, and resilience, we’ve brought down the median case processing time from 80 seconds to 31 seconds. With these enhancements, in less than a minute, Sixfold can research publicly available information to learn everything we can about a business and analyze the aggregated data for business summarization and NAICS/SIC classification.

✔️ Embed Sixfold across Underwriters’ Existing Workflows with our API

With the Sixfold API, carriers can seamlessly integrate Sixfold into existing workflows for enhanced productivity and unified risk management. From automated data gathering and ingestion to custom-tailored underwriting recommendations that can be embedded across existing workflows and systems, Sixfold cuts out the manual work and document handling overhead for 10x faster risk review processes.

✔️ Mitigating drift and bias with our Responsible AI framework 

Designed to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape confidently, Sixfold’s Responsible AI framework ensures carriers are well-insulated from risk with its enhanced auditability, data provenance, and traceability. By actively collaborating with regulatory bodies and legal counsel, Sixfold remains at the forefront of responsible AI innovation, safeguarding carriers with unparalleled diligence.

👀 Coming Soon: Research Assistant

Stay tuned for future launch updates to hear about upcoming capabilities like Sixfold’s Research Assistant, designed to find answers to complex research questions, all of which are grounded in the original source material with citations.

Want to see our new capabilities in action?
Get in touch →

New Features to Revolutionize Life & Disability Underwriting
Feature Release

New Features to Revolutionize Life & Disability Underwriting

Our latest Life and Disability AI-powered features focus on overcoming longstanding underwriting challenges and gives a fresh perspective to underwriters.

5 min read
Lana Jovanovic

With our latest product update, we’ve sharpened our focus on Life & Disability via a suite of AI-powered features that overcome common underwriting challenges.

Sixfold’s number one superpower is to easily–and quickly–ingest carriers’ unique underwriting guidelines and automatically surface the submissions that match the carrier’s unique risk appetite. Moreover, the platform empowers Life & Disability carriers to streamline the underwriting process by:

🔘 Ingesting data from multiple disparate sources in an instant

🔘 Generating a comprehensive summarization of the applicant's health history and lifestyle within minutes

🔘 Surfacing positive & negative risk signals aligning with the unique risk appetite of each carrier 

🔘 Triaging submissions with an underwriter-facing dashboard for improved resource allocation

We've significantly broadened our Life & Disability offerings by expanding into six key areas, facilitating us to quickly create a comprehensive 360-degree applicant profile in just minutes by: 

✔️ Reducing manual workload through improved document ingestion 

Our technology has been significantly enhanced to process and analyze an extensive history of lab results, diagnoses, and medication records, covering years or even decades.

The platform is proficient in ingesting data from various sources including APS files, MIB reports, labs, applications, supplementals, Electronic Health Records (EHR), and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) files. By automating the ingestion of these diverse data types, Sixfold eliminates the need for manual document handling by underwriters.

✔️ Refining risk evaluation with a holistic view of medications, treatments, lifestyle choices, and family history

The platform leverages advanced synthesis of adjacent applicant history information, including pertinent family medical histories and lifestyle attributes, to offer a comprehensive understanding of their broader health habits and disease predispositions.

The platform uses advanced analysis of applicants' history, including family medical backgrounds and lifestyle factors, to provide a complete view of their health habits.

By integrating details from submitted records—such as family diagnoses ("father was diagnosed with melanoma at 63, but was successfully treated")—with insights into exercise routines ("engages in moderate-intensity aerobic exercise and weight lifting"), hobbies ("applicant scuba dives several times per year"), and substance use ("consumes a few beers every few days"), Sixfold provides a holistic view of an applicant's health.

This comprehensive approach enhances the precision of assessments, enabling more informed decisions regarding risk.

The platform enriches health profiles by focusing on hobbies alongside exercise routines and medical history.

✔️ Improving risk decision precision with in-depth analysis of health condition progression 

We are now able to aggregate data related to a condition, including adjacent factors like medication, to chronologically track the comprehensive progression of the condition across multiple data sources. By utilizing detailed health data and its evolution over time, we enable more informed and accurate underwriting decisions.

This approach provides a unique layer of detail, incorporating crucial health information over time, allowing underwriters to quickly grasp risk with relevant context, thereby informing more precise rating and pricing.

Now, we can track a condition's progression over time from various data sources, offering a complete health timeline.

✔️ Enhancing fraud detection by identifying inconsistencies across sources

Underwriters are tasked with synthesizing and managing a vast amount of information from lengthy documents, including Attending Physician Statements (APS), self-reported data, laboratory results, and more. An important aspect of analyzing these documents is to identify inconsistencies or discrepancies that could arise from oversight or fraud. Instead of solely relying on underwriters to detect irregularities across diverse documents, Sixfold proactively identifies and flags these discrepancies to the underwriter.

The platform's automated capability to identify problematic areas empowers underwriters to make informed decisions, leading to more accurate pricing of premiums and greater reliability of applicant information, safeguarding both insurers and applicants.

Sixfold proactively identifies and highlights discrepancies for underwriters.

✔️ Expanding traceability with full document and page number sourcing

Our recent achievement of SOC 2 Type 2 certification underscores our commitment to being a responsible AI solution.

In this release, we've taken traceability to the next level by ensuring underwriters have access to complete information sourcing, pinpointing the exact document and page for increased transparency and accuracy.

✔️ Boosting underwriting capacity with upgraded triaging functionality 

Sixfold's latest update introduces a streamlined dashboard experience, designed specifically to empower underwriters to efficiently prioritize applicants who meet their risk tolerance and gracefully set aside those who do not. This effectively addresses the common 'front door issue' in Life & Disability underwriting, which involves managing an overwhelming influx of submissions by automating the pre-processing of applications. Within minutes, Sixfold accurately identifies and aligns applicants with the carrier’s risk criteria, significantly easing the burden of manual sorting and enabling underwriters to focus on the most suitable cases.

Our newest updates equip life & disability underwriters with a complete, clear and accurate health snapshot for every applicant, pinpointing key data points without sacrificing our commitment to compliance and data privacy.

Curious to see it all live? 👉 Watch our 20-minute product demo.

Navigating Unwritten Regulations: How We Did It
Feature Release

Navigating Unwritten Regulations: How We Did It

As regulators at all levels of government are drafting rules guiding the usage of artificial intelligence, Sixfold AI built a platform for unwritten rules.

5 min read
Alex Schmelkin

AI is the defining technology of this decade. After years of unfulfilled promises from Hollywood and comic books, the science fiction AI future we’ve long been promised has finally become business reality. 

We can already see AI following a familiar path through the marketplace similar to past disruptive technologies.

  • Stage one: it’s embraced by early adopters before the general public even knows it exists;
  • Stage two: cutting-edge startups tap these technologies to overcome long-standing business challenges; and then
  • Stage three: regulators draft rules to guide its usage and mitigate negative impacts.

There should be no doubt that AI-powered insurtech has accelerated through the first two stages in near record time and is now entering stage three.

AI underwriting solutions, meet the rule-makers

The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies recently adopted regulations on AI applications and governance in life insurance. To be clear, Colorado isn’t an outlier, it’s a pioneer. Other states are following suit and crafting their own AI regulations, with federal-level AI rules beginning to take shape as well.

The early days of the regulatory phase can be tricky for businesses. Insurers are excited to adopt advanced AI into their underwriting tech stack, but wary of investing in platforms knowing that future rules may impact those investments. 

We at Sixfold are very cognizant of this dichotomy: The ambition to innovate ahead, combined with the trepidation of going too far down the wrong path. That’s why we designed our platform in anticipation of these emerging rules. 

We’ve met with state-level regulators on numerous occasions over the past year to understand their concerns and thought processes. These engagements have been invaluable for all parties as their input played a major role in guiding our platform’s development, while our technical insights influenced the formation of these emerging rules.

Sixfold CEO Alex Schmelkin (right) joined a panel discussion about AI in underwriting at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)’s Summer 2023 national meeting in Seattle, WA.

To simplify a very complex motion: regulators are concerned with bias in algorithms. There’s a tacit understanding that humans have inherent biases, which may be reflected in algorithms and applied at scale.

Most regulators we’ve engaged with agree that these very legitimate concerns about bias aren’t a reason to prohibit or even severely restrain AI, which brings enormous positives like accelerated underwriting cycles, reduced overhead, and increased objectivity–all of which ultimately benefit consumers. However, for AI to work for everyone, it must be partnered with transparency, traceability, and privacy. This is a message we at Sixfold have taken to heart.

In AI, it’s all about transparency

The past decade saw a plethora of algorithmic underwriting solutions with varying degrees of capabilities. Too often, these tools are “black boxes” that leave underwriters, brokers, and carriers unable to explain how decisions were arrived at. Opaque decision-making no longer meets the expectations of today’s consumers—or of regulators. That’s why we designed Sixfold with transparency at its core.

Customers accept automation as part of the modern digital landscape, but that acceptance comes with expectations. Our platform automatically surfaces relevant data points impacting its recommendations and presents them to underwriters via AI-generated plain-language summarizations, while carefully controlling for “hallucinations.” It provides full traceability of all inputs, as well as a full lineage of changes to the UW model, so carriers can explain why results diverged over time. These baked-in layers of transparency allow carriers–and the regulators overseeing them–to identify and mitigate incidental biases seeping into UW models.

Beyond prioritizing transparency, we‘ve designed a platform that elevates data security and privacy. All Sixfold customers operate within isolated, single-tenant environments, and end-user data is never persisted in the LLM-powered Gen AI layer so information remains protected and secure.  

Even with platform features built in anticipation of external regulations, we understand that some internal compliance teams are cautious about integrating gen AI, a relatively new concept, into their tech stack. To help your internal stakeholders get there, Sixfold can be implemented with robust internal auditability and appropriate levels of human-in-the-loop-ness to ensure that every team is comfortable on the new technological frontier.

Want to learn more about how Sixfold works? Get in touch.

Sixfold emphasizes the importance of collaborating with regulators to create technology that benefits everyone.

We at Sixfold believe regulators play a vital role in the marketplace by setting ground rules that protect consumers. As we see it, it’s not the technologist’s place to oppose or confront regulators; it’s to work together to ensure that technology works for everyone.