July 7, 2025
Part 2: Sedgwick’s roadmap for AI in property claims
As AI increasingly becomes a major part of our everyday lives, it’s also causing massive ripples in the loss adjusting industry. While the first wave of AI and digital tools streamlined low-complexity claims, deeper integration and smarter systems are on the horizon. As agentic and generative AI get more and more powerful, they’re reshaping the role of the adjuster and unlocking untold efficiency.
With the future at our doorstep, Sedgwick is embracing these tools while making sure our humanity, empathy and personal touch stay central to everything we do.
Working faster with automated intelligence
Today, AI tools are helping adjusters work faster. Tomorrow, they’ll help us work smarter.
We currently have a dedicated team working to create agentic AI: AI that acts like a digital assistant, interpreting data, offering recommendations and supporting complex decision-making. While traditional AI simply executes predefined tasks, agentic AI integrates into our core systems and helps us on a deeper level.
But this doesn’t mean we’re looking to remove the human element — quite the opposite. With AI as a second set of eyes, our adjusters can work more efficiently. These programs can process raw data with ease and flag high-risk claims, reinforcing adjusters’ abilities to give cases the empathy and attention they deserve.
Currently, these programs are being rolled out in specific business units. But within the next couple of years, they’ll revolutionize our claims systems.
Clarifying complexity with generative AI
While agentic AI acts as a virtual assistant, generative AI summarizes and interprets large volumes of information in an instant. For adjusters who often face hundreds of pages of photos and documents, tools like these are invaluable, saving adjusters hours of work.
For example, we’re using AI programs in our day-to-day to:
- Summarize long adjuster reports to extract key facts and timelines.
And we’re exploring AI programs that can:
- Organize and interpret repair invoices for commercial losses involving multiple contractors.
- Support forensic accounting teams by analyzing financial data from years of business records.
And just like with agentic AI, these tools are enhancing our expert teams, not replacing them. By removing manual, repetitive tasks, our adjusters can focus their personal attention on more cases and move them along the claims process faster.
Finding the insights in unstructured data
While these programs excel at sifting through troves of data and simplifying it for human eyes, they can also unlock hidden insights in unstructured data that human eyes might overlook.
Adjuster reports are rich in data, but most of it lives in fields and formats that traditional analytics can’t access. Our response was a pilot project to extract over one hundred data points from thousands of claim documents to identify trends, report on insights and deliver actionable insights to our partners.
While we’re still working through this large-scale project, we’re excited about the potential to transform how we understand risk and respond to emerging patterns. And with the unmatched perspective that only our scale and history bring, we can unlock an even wider point of view to serve our partners.
AI power meets human heart
Despite all that AI can do, there’s one invaluable aspect of the claims process it will never replace: human expertise. While loss adjusting involves plenty of data analytics and technical skills, human empathy and judgement are still needed to make decisions in often emotionally charged cases.
The future of loss adjusting is about creating a system where AI tools and human beings enrich each other’s strengths. It’s a system where AI can help a policyholder file their own claim, and their adjuster is right there to walk them through a difficult process. One where AI summarizes dozens of pages of documents, and a human interprets the nuances of a conversation with contractors.
Our goal is never man vs. machine, but a partnership that transforms our industry.
Our responsible roadmap to AI rollout
We have ambitious goals for the future, but we’re committed to taking a measured, responsible approach to innovation. We’ve slowly rolled out agentic AI for small teams to measure its success, with the hope to have it reach property claims in earnest by 2026 or 2027. In addition to that, several high-impact initiatives are already transforming how we work, including:
- Automated claim setup using AI to extract data and eliminate manual entry.
- Auto-assignment engines to assign adjusters to cases based on location and workload.
- Digital adjuster tools to allow policyholders to self-report low-severity losses.
Already, these advancements are reducing cycle times, lowering costs and improving the experience for our policyholders — especially for low-complexity claims.
Transforming our industry
As society is rapidly adapting to AI tools, so is loss adjusting. This evolution is building smarter systems for adjusters, policyholders and our partners — everyone involved at every step of the claims process.
As we continue to invest in these powerful new tools, we’re equally committed to retaining the human element at every stage. Innovation must be responsible; it’s the only way to meet the quality we’re known for. The AI is making us more efficient, but our humanity is what makes us thrive.
