#StartupsEverywhere: Regina Jaslow, CEO, Innocuous AI
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Revolutionizing insurance claims through AI
Despite decades of technological innovation, filing an insurance claim today remains as unnerving, unclear, and unpleasant for the policyholder as it was 30 years ago. Regina Jaslow saw this stagnation and founded Innocuous AI to improve the insurance claims process for all stakeholders involved – from the policyholder to the insurance carrier and everyone along the way that is involved in the claims process. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Regina about her company, her product, and why it’s important to engage with regulators about the realities of AI in the insurance sector.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Innocuous AI?
I’ve had several personal experiences with filing insurance claims; I’ve filed nine claims over 25 years across property, auto, and business insurance policies. During those years, we all have experienced how technology has changed dramatically, and made our lives different. You would expect that the first couple of insurance claims I made in the 1990s would be vastly different from the one I filed just earlier this year, but that is not the case.
My co-founder and I embarked on a journey of trying to figure out what is going on in insurance claims, and why it seems to be this special little area that has seen little to no change from a policyholder experience. We learned that insurance regulations and state statutes are incredibly convoluted. These laws and regulations change over time, and when compounded with 50 states having different and changing information, it can be hard for claims adjusters to keep up. As a result, they might inadvertently rely on outdated information or miss important updates and deadlines that can affect claim outcomes. Claims adjusters are unable to communicate clearly with policyholders what to expect if they are unclear about timelines and obligations to policyholders that differ over time based on the state and insurance type.
All these rules and regulations are intended to protect policyholders like us, and when they’re not adhered to, insurance firms are deemed out of compliance. So, I decided to work on helping insurance companies more easily comply with these rules and regulations. As we worked with them, we realized there’s a lot of workflow automation using AI that they could also benefit from.
What is the work you all are doing at Innocuous AI?
Innocuous AI developed an assistive AI product that streamlines the workflows for insurance claims adjusters. Our AI solution saves time and enables claims adjusters to better serve policyholders by reducing stress and freeing up time for unrushed human interactions with their customers. I believe the human touch is more important than ever in this AI age. In claims, you still want to talk to a human being because you have little to no experience with making a claim as a policyholder and you are feeling anxious, severely inconvenienced, and emotionally drained dealing with the loss. Most people make one or two claims per insurance product they purchase in their lifetime, and the circumstances are usually vastly different each time so you can’t always draw from your prior claim experience.
Tell us more about the product and how it’s built.
Innocuous AI uses both generative and agentic AI in its solution. We leverage multiple large language models (LLMs) and have thousands of AI agents to handle specific tasks in the claims process.
For example, one of the workflows we streamline is comparisons of estimates involved in first-party property claims. The estimate from the company that represents policyholders could be a document with over 100 pages of a PDF. The claims adjuster will prepare their own estimate for the cost to cover the claim which is similar in length. Comparing these long PDFs from different parties can get painfully laborious, is error-prone, and time-consuming. Innocuous AI goes through all the line items, compares them, calls out what’s different, and what they should talk about to negotiate the differences.
Innocuous AI is also a chat tool. You can use it for asking anything about all the different rules and regulations that a claims adjuster doesn’t always know because they are adjusting across multiple states. Every insurance company tries its hand at gathering some of this information independently, which is time-consuming and a waste of resources as it’s a duplicated effort across firms for an activity that isn’t core to their business but a function to fulfill regulatory requirements. All this ends up increasing premiums across the board. Even so, what’s gathered can still be inaccurate or outdated because these jurisdictional details are always changing. Innocuous AI provides a more centralized solution as an industry tool to keep the cost down for the insurance ecosystem, which should ultimately aid in keeping premiums affordable.
Insurance is regulated at the state level. How are you navigating that and what implications does it have for your business?
Each state is different when it comes to both the rules and where you can find information about them. For example, when a policyholder files a claim, the insurance company has to issue an acknowledgement letter within a certain number of days—in one state that deadline might be 15 calendar days, and in another state, 10 business days. If they miss a deadline—even by accident—it can ultimately trigger a lawsuit and very expensive litigation. That’s why it’s so important to have accurate information, and it’s one of the areas where our product provides assistance in reducing enterprise risk and litigation cost. These high costs ultimately show up as higher premiums for policyholders.
But that information is not always easy to find online or might not even be digitized. In some states, you have to go to a courthouse to access needed information. That means that resources need to be allocated to such data-gathering activities. It’s not just that scaling to each state is hard because there are different rules, it’s also that how you access information about those rules varies.
You’ve been active in engaging state insurance regulators about AI. Why do you think that is important?
With AI, some state regulators are considering paperwork-laden draconian requirements that’s coming from a place of lack of understanding. Insurance regulators want to ensure that AI doesn’t hurt protected classes of consumers, but it’s pretty clear from some of the questions they’ve been asking that they don’t yet have a good grasp on how AI works and how rapidly AI is changing such that their proposals will not help fulfill those goals—not today and certainly not in a few months. For example, startups like us are using models developed by other technology firms, and we add our algorithms, processes, and industry-specific information to develop our product. Today, an AI firm might have a few thousand AI agents but in a few months, any one firm will have hundreds of thousands of AI agents that it will not be possible for them to audit adequately given regulators’ resources. Evaluating us as if it was all our technology doesn’t make much sense. Requesting to dig through all of these ever-changing models or AI agents is impractical. We’d love to assist regulators in achieving their end-goals by having an open dialog with them about how AI works and how best to protect the end constituency we all care about—the policyholder, in a practical and cost-effective way.
What are your goals for Innocuous AI going forward?
We have a goal to raise our seed round in the next few months, and that will enable us to scale our product and impact. We are excited to help insurance professionals work with greater efficiency and better regulatory compliance, while making their work more enjoyable. We want to enable them to bring that newfound energy from available time to help uplift policyholders in their hardest moments while navigating their claim.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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