Case study: reading 400-page reinsurance contracts without reading them

Last month Aon launched an AI platform that scans reinsurance contracts to flag exclusions and coverage gaps at scale (Reinsurance News). That's a big-company solution for a big-company problem. But the same problem exists further down the market, and we just finished building a smaller version of it.

Here's what that looked like.

What they had

The client is a mid-market commercial insurance broker. About 40 people. They place complex layered policies for clients in construction, logistics, and energy. Every renewal season, three senior brokers spent most of their week doing the same thing: reading 200 to 400-page carrier contracts side by side, marking exclusions, noting endorsement changes from the prior year, and building a coverage comparison for the client.

The tools they used: Adobe Acrobat for markup, Excel for comparisons, SharePoint for storage, a policy management system for records, and email threads for everything else. Five tools, none of them talking to each other, and the actual intelligence lived in the brokers' heads.

The pain wasn't that the work was hard. It was that it was slow, repetitive, and impossible to scale. Onboarding a new broker took over a year before they could be trusted with a large account.

What we built

One web app. Brokers upload the carrier PDFs. The system extracts clauses, classifies them (exclusions, sublimits, endorsements, definitions), and compares them against the prior year's contract and against a library of standard market language the client curated with us.

The output is a coverage-gap report the broker reviews and edits, not one the AI ships blind. That distinction matters. Every flagged clause links back to the exact page and paragraph in the source PDF, so the broker can verify in one click instead of hunting through 300 pages.

Under the hood: a document parser, a retrieval layer over their historical contract library, an LLM for classification and summarization, and a review UI. Managed hosting on our infrastructure. No new SaaS subscriptions.

What changed

A renewal comparison that used to take 15 to 20 hours now takes 2 to 3, including broker review. They retired the Excel templates and most of the SharePoint sprawl. New hires are contributing to real accounts inside three months instead of a year.

The broader shift here is not unique to insurance. Retool's 2026 build-vs-buy report shows companies increasingly replacing bundles of generic SaaS with purpose-built internal apps, and Newsweek reported the same trend across mid-market buyers this year.

The takeaway

You don't need Aon's budget to get Aon's leverage. If your team is doing expert work on top of a stack of PDFs, spreadsheets, and shared drives, there's probably a smaller, boring, purpose-built app that gives you most of the win.

If you want to know whether your situation qualifies, we do a free discovery call. No pitch, just a diagnosis.