Reducing Underwriter Referrals for a Leading Live Insurer

How StitchStudio's Insurance-Specific AI agent reduced manual reviews, cut annual costs, and improved retention without changing the life insurer’s core systems

Business Challenge

Manual underwriting referrals remain one of the biggest barriers to efficient policy issuance in life insurance, especially for Final Expense products, where applicants expect instant decisions with minimal friction. For the leading life insurer, over 60% of Final Expense applications were referred to manual underwriting (RTU), primarily due to mismatches between third-party pharmacy data and applicant responses. The life insurer needed a way to reduce RTU referrals without compromising underwriting accuracy or requiring a system overhaul.

StitchStudio's Solution

StitchStudio partnered with a leading life insurer to design and implement a specialized AI underwriting agent tailored to one of its key products.

The agent was configured to operate inside the life insurer’s existing workflows while delivering explainable, insurance-specific decisions.

Key Capabilities Delivered:

• AI-driven risk and discrepancy identification interactive clarification with applicants
• Evergreen learning agent i.e. a knowledge worker
• Increase underwriting throughput
• Frictionless applicant experience

Business Impact

The Stitch deployment is projected to:

1. Increase Auto-Decision Rate: Boost straight-through processing for Final Expense from 40% to 70%, cutting RTU cases nearly in half.
2. Cut Underwriting Costs: Save the leading life insurer ~$300,000 annually in underwriter review time and case handling costs, with greater savings as volumes grow.
3. Improve Applicant Retention: Reduce applicant drop-off by at least 15%.
4. A trainable knowledge worker: The agent is designed to make the underwriting process smarter, more consistent, and more scalable over time.

What's Ahead

The leading life insurer’s success illustrates a broader trend in the insurance market: the shift from static underwriting rules to adaptive, learning-based decision systems.
The life insurer intends to expand the use of StitchStudio's agents to other life products in their portfolio, rapidly followed by the use of agents to streamline the commission and claims process.

By deploying Stitch’s AI underwriting agent, the life insurer is future-proofing its underwriting engine for continued scale, speed, and compliance.

For insurers looking to accelerate time-to-decision and improve applicant experience, without sacrificing control, Stitch offers a proven path