ACORD has announced the winner of its Student Challenge 2025, a competition that invites university students to use AI tools to analyze and organize real insurance data, engineer prompts to extract insights from published sources and contribute to insurance development standards. For this year's challenge, students were tasked with leveraging AI to analyze data fields for underwriting pet insurance and presenting their methodology and results to ACORD judges.
"We wanted to do this student challenge to really attract talent and bring a fresh, outside perspective to our industry," said Tanya Krochta, ACORD executive vice president, chief operating officer. "Our head of research, education and consulting created the student challenge in conjunction with our standards department, and we chose pet insurance because it's a very timely topic–it's a business that's growing by leaps and bounds in the industry."
Digital Insurance met with the winner of the student challenge, Manasa Ramaka, a University of Connecticut graduate student, who is pursuing a Master of Science degree in Business Analytics and Project Management. Ramaka's approach to her entry was first to gain a better understanding of the challenges with standardization in pet insurance.
"Insurance is an industry which is very sensitive with data, because it holds a lot of personal information, which is private and is governed by many rules," said Ramaka. "I was quite interested in seeing how we can use AI in this scope, following all the data governing rules while also making an impact on the data standards."
Ramaka started by checking with different large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and assessing real carrier forms to learn more about the challenges of data standardization in the industry, as well as what kinds of data a pet insurance underwriter may need and the information required to assess claim risk.
"I also used AI to actually get more details than what I found on the real carrier forms, because I wanted to be more inclusive on the data fields and also add not-so-common pets–I wanted to extend it beyond just the cats or dogs and think about the exotic species," explained Ramaka.
Krochta shared that in assessing the entries, ACORD looked at the applicant's analysis and framework and how complete their data is throughout the process. By including so many data fields, more than 700 sets according to Ramaka, she had to perform plenty of data cleaning and deduplication.
"While I was trying to include more kinds of species, I was also trying to keep it concise. I didn't want to overflow it with the data fields, so I generalized most of them to fit– like how there are specific things for a pet that might not be applicable to others," said Ramka. "I would say that while AI and algorithms helped me a lot, it also took me a lot of manual effort to go through my list after the algorithm stick to see if everything is working fine."
For the first place prize, Ramaka will receive $5,000, a free pass to ACORD Connect 2026 and one year of mentorship with an industry professional. The winning entries will inform future development of the ACORD Data Standards.
