Takeaways:
- 'Document chaos' makes it tougher for insurers to use AI
- Upstage offers a Gen AI solution that users can customize
- Hanwha Life Insurance found statistics to inform its pricing
The documents that an insurer feeds into an AI system come in a variety of formats – email attachments, downloads from portals, forms and more.
This makes it easy to end up with "document chaos" that can lead the AI to make mistakes affecting the insurer's understanding of its data and handling of claims, said Kasey Roh, CEO of Upstage, a Gen AI solutions company that just received
The company digitizes documents to make them easier to review, and to evaluate using AI. Hanwha Life Insurance, in Korea, used the solution to digitize about 10 million documents, including medical records, according to Roh. "With that, they were able to identify some of the key trends and statistics that affect the pricing and the utilization of their life insurance," she said.
Upstage addresses document chaos by allowing its users to adjust AI models to prevent or correct these mistakes. "With other technology providers, insurers get stuck because the models that they use cannot be tweaked, because it's not their own model," Roh said. "They didn't build it from scratch. It's still a black box for them. There's only so much optimization that they can do. But because we have the model and the pipeline and the application all within our house, when the customer comes and brings an issue, we have so many levers that we can use to fix that issue."
The company's technology is especially useful for P&C insurers, which often have a wider variety of documents and formats than life insurers, Roh explained.
Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services unit, started backing Upstage in late 2023, according to Roh. Upstage's products, which include Solar Pro 2 and Solar Mini Gen AI, along with Document Parse and Information Extract, are available on Amazon Bedrock Marketplace operated by AWS.
This is helping bring customers to the startup, launched in 2020. Also, Roh added, being available through AWS allows Upstage users to pay for its services with their cloud computing budgets.
"Extraction using AI is the most fundamental and proven ROI use case that we believe we can solve the best, and we're doubling down on these efforts," she said.
