Suncorp expects about five AI agents handling sub-processes of insurance claims processing to go into production later in June 2026, according to a report from the Databricks Data+AI Summit in San Francisco. Two of the five work at the first notice of loss (FNOL) stage, where a customer reports an incident, and are targeted at capturing and validating the report and then classifying and routing it internally. Suncorp has also assembled "a controls library of about 100 different controls across different types of AI applications and for different types of risks."
AI practice executive Kranthi Nekkalapu said: "We haven't automated the full end-to-end process, but there are sub-processes within that which we are automating at the moment," and "The first set of ones, about five of them, are expected to go into production later this month."
Nekkalapu described claims as workflows: "Claims processes are inherently very complex, but at a high level, they are workflows." The set stages are intake, triage or assessment, fulfilment and settlement, and in an agentic world the workflow remains the same while individual tasks within it could be done by agents.
The report says it appears at least one of these agents is voice-based. "We have got voice agents which went into production very recently," Nekkalapu said. "They do the initial intake of the claim in some cases, and if it becomes more complex, then pass on to humans."
In the reference design, the entire claims workflow is mapped using business process model and notation (BPMN) and orchestrated with UiPath, and each task could be done by an agent, a system of agents or workflows themselves. A "system of agents" is specified to perform a "coverage check" as part of triage and assessment. Agents are also to be used for "vendor dispatch" and to handle any settlement calculation.
Observability runs through a central platform built on Databricks that ingests OpenTelemetry (OTel) based data feeds from the agents and technologies in the claims workflow. "We're bringing in traces by having an OTel collector on Databricks, so all the traces from agents and workflows across all those platforms will be sent to Databricks in real time," he said. Dashboards give senior leadership, the safety team, business users and engineers different views, and Databricks Genie Code was added to the dashboard so it can provide insights at different levels based on who is asking the question.
Humans remain involved, from claims that become too complex for an agent to reviewing claims an agent determines should be rejected. "We do want a human gate there, where all the rejected claims may have to go through a mandatory human review," Nekkalapu said.
Suncorp is also working on "complex agents" that can "determine whether a claim should be covered or not." Nekkalapu said: "We've developed a workflow with agents in there which can do all these jobs with 99 percent accuracy."