Swiss Re

Life & Health insurance underwriting demands precise, current medical and actuarial information to assess individual applicant risk across diverse conditions and geographies. Underwriters at Swiss Re's client organizations relied on standard keyword search tools to navigate Life Guide — the industry's leading L&H underwriting manual — forcing them to manually scan multiple sources before reaching a defensible decision. With thousands of underwriters across 100+ countries generating over 23 million annual manual lookups, the cumulative drag on decision velocity was significant. In a regulated environment where both speed and accuracy carry direct financial consequences, this search-heavy workflow represented a meaningful constraint on underwriting throughput and consistency.

Swiss Re developed Life Guide Scout, a Generative AI-powered assistant built in-house and integrated directly into the Life Guide platform via Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Rather than replacing the authoritative knowledge base, Scout augments it: underwriters submit natural language queries and receive AI-generated answers in seconds, each accompanied by explicit source citations drawn from Life Guide's curated expert content. The integration leverages Azure's secure, compliant cloud infrastructure to meet the regulatory and data-sovereignty requirements of the global insurance market. Scout launched in April 2024 as an English-language pilot, with a broader multi-language rollout planned for later that year — a phased approach designed to validate accuracy and compliance before scaling across Swiss Re's international client base.

Life Guide Scout delivers measurable efficiency gains to an already large-scale platform. Key outcomes include:

• 23 million+ annual hits on Life Guide, now eligible for AI-assisted query resolution
• 100+ countries reached through the existing Life Guide distribution network
• Cardiovascular risk calculator used on average every five seconds — illustrating the frequency of high-stakes, time-sensitive lookups that Scout is designed to accelerate

Beyond speed, the cited-source architecture improves decision auditability — a critical requirement in regulated underwriting workflows. The tool also supports knowledge transfer within client organizations, reducing dependence on senior underwriter availability for complex risk queries.

• Augmenting an established, trusted knowledge base with AI delivers faster adoption than building a standalone tool — users already trust the source material.
• Requiring AI responses to cite specific sources is not optional in regulated industries; it is the feature that makes the output actionable and auditable.
• Piloting in a single language before multilingual rollout allows teams to catch domain-specific accuracy gaps before they propagate at scale.
• Embedding AI at the point of decision — inside the tool underwriters already use — eliminates workflow friction and drives organic adoption.
• Cloud infrastructure with built-in compliance controls (such as Azure OpenAI) is a practical prerequisite when deploying AI across multi-jurisdictional insurance operations.