Automated Certificate of Insurance Audits: Ensuring Compliance and Reducing Third-Party Risk for Risk Transfer Specialists

Every Risk Transfer Specialist knows the stakes: one missing endorsement on a subcontractor’s certificate of insurance (COI), one lapsed general liability policy on a property vendor, or one overstated limit on an excess policy can shift millions in loss exposure back to the named insured. In General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners portfolios, third-party non-compliance is a persistent, compounding risk—especially when you are managing thousands of vendors, trades, and service providers across jobs, properties, and seasons.

Nomad Data’s Doc Chat was built for exactly this challenge. It is a purpose-built, AI-powered suite of agents that reads and reconciles COIs, contracts, endorsements, and vendor onboarding documents at enterprise scale, then answers your compliance questions in real time. Instead of spending weeks eyeballing ACORD 25s, ACORD 28s, and ACORD 27s for gaps, Doc Chat performs an AI audit of certificates of insurance in minutes, flags non-compliance, identifies lapsed coverage, and maps every requirement back to the underlying contract language—so Risk Transfer Specialists can move from chasing documents to managing risk.

Why COI Compliance Is So Difficult in General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners

Risk transfer in construction and property operations is document-driven and time-sensitive. For General Liability & Construction, project owners, GCs, and upstream parties typically require specific coverage types and limits, Additional Insured (AI) status on ongoing and completed operations, Primary & Noncontributory wording, and a Waiver of Subrogation (Waiver of Transfer of Rights) in favor of the owner or GC. Property & Homeowners teams oversee a different but equally complex mix—proof of property coverage for vendors entering premises, evidence of homeowners or landlord coverage for tenants and short-term operators, and loss payee or mortgagee protections for assets under management. Across both lines of business, the nuances are buried in the paperwork.

Consider just a few realities the Risk Transfer Specialist faces daily:

• COIs are attestations, not contracts. An ACORD 25 can show the box for Additional Insured or Waiver of Subrogation, but those rights truly live in the ISO forms and endorsements (for example, CG 20 10 04/13 for ongoing operations, CG 20 37 04/13 for completed operations, CG 20 33 for scheduled AI, and CG 24 04 for Waiver of Transfer of Rights of Recovery). Without the actual endorsement, the protection may be illusory.
• Construction risk is time-bound. Contractual AI for completed operations often needs to continue through the statute of repose, meaning an endorsement that ends at job completion is insufficient. Doc Chat can verify whether completed operations AI is actually granted for the requisite period.
• Property interests require precision. For Property & Homeowners, evidence of insurance via ACORD 27 (Evidence of Property Insurance) and ACORD 28 (Evidence of Commercial Property Insurance) must align with loss payee or lenders loss payable endorsements (e.g., ISO CP 12 18) and reflect accurate subject locations, interests, and limits. Certificates regularly omit these details.
• Umbrella and excess layers need to follow form. Many requirements specify that Additional Insured, Primary & Noncontributory, and Waiver of Subrogation must extend to excess layers. Without reviewing the excess declarations and the schedule of underlying insurance, assumptions are risky.
• Naming convention mismatches abound. The insured name on the COI often fails to match the counterparty name in the contract or vendor master. Even subtle discrepancies can create coverage disputes.

Multiply these realities across hundreds of projects and properties, thousands of vendors, and rolling renewals—and you see why manual COI compliance audits strain even the most experienced Risk Transfer Specialists.

How COI Compliance Is Handled Manually Today

Most organizations rely on a mix of spreadsheets, email chains, and file shares. A Risk Transfer Specialist receives vendor onboarding documents and a contract with insurance requirements, then requests COIs and endorsements from the vendor’s broker. The COI arrives—often an ACORD 25 for General Liability & Construction, sometimes paired with ACORD 28 (commercial property) or ACORD 27 (homeowners/tenant property). The specialist scans for policy numbers, effective/expiration dates, limits, and checkboxes for AI and Waiver. Next, they chase separate PDF endorsements to confirm ISO form numbers and exact wording, attempt to confirm that Primary & Noncontributory is specifically granted, and check whether umbrella/excess follows form for AI and Waiver. For property interests, they validate loss payee/mortgagee clauses, correct addresses, and building or contents limits.

Every step is a manual compare-and-contrast exercise. They reconcile the contract’s insurance exhibit against evidence presented in the COI, scan the ACORD 101 Additional Remarks schedule for special conditions, and verify the certificate holder and Description of Operations field for specific job locations or blanket wording. When they find gaps—insufficient limits, expired policies, missing completed ops AI, absent Waiver—they email the broker for corrections and re-issuance. Calendar reminders are created for 30/60/90-day expiration reviews. For large portfolios, surge periods (renewal seasons, project mobilizations) create significant backlogs.

This manual method is fragile. It depends on human stamina to read thousands of pages without missing small but consequential discrepancies. It depends on institutional knowledge that lives in people’s heads rather than in documented, repeatable rules. And it often produces inconsistent outcomes when volume spikes or when new staff rotate onto the desk.

From Manual Grind to Machine Precision: Doc Chat as a Certificate of Insurance Compliance Tool

Doc Chat by Nomad Data transforms COI auditing into an automated, scalable, and defensible process. It ingests entire third-party document sets—certificates of insurance, endorsement copies, contracts and insurance exhibits, vendor onboarding submissions—and executes the same rigorous checks your best Risk Transfer Specialists perform. You can literally ask the system, “Does this vendor meet the contract requirements for Additional Insured on ongoing and completed operations, Primary & Noncontributory, and Waiver of Subrogation?” and receive an instant answer with page-level citations.

If you’ve been searching for an AI audit certificates of insurance approach that your team can trust, Doc Chat is a purpose-built solution. It’s not a generic OCR layer or a keyword tool—it reads like a specialist, applies your organization’s playbook, and presents the rationale behind every pass/fail decision. When you need a certificate of insurance compliance tool that scales from dozens to tens of thousands of vendors, Doc Chat delivers speed without sacrificing diligence.

What Doc Chat Checks—Automatically

For General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners, Doc Chat runs a deep bench of standardized, policy-anchored checks and lets you tailor additional requirements by project, property, or program. Below is a non-exhaustive sample of what it automates for Risk Transfer Specialists:

• COI Structure and Identity: Validates ACORD 25, ACORD 28, ACORD 27, and ACORD 101 content; confirms insured entity name and address alignment with vendor master and contract; checks producer and insurer names with NAIC codes when available.
• Dates and Status: Flags expired or soon-to-expire effective/expiration dates; issues proactive alerts to find lapsed COI coverage at scale across all vendors and properties.
• Limits and Coverages: Compares stated GL, Auto, Umbrella/Excess, and Property limits against contract; flags sublimits or aggregates that undercut requirements; checks business description and operations for applicability.
• Additional Insured and Waivers: Extracts endorsement copies and verifies ISO forms (e.g., CG 20 10 04/13 ongoing operations, CG 20 37 04/13 completed operations, CG 20 33 scheduled AI, CG 24 04 Waiver of Subrogation); confirms grant is blanket vs. scheduled and that project/location naming is correct.
• Primary & Noncontributory: Verifies exact wording via endorsements or policy form language; flags where the COI alone asserts P&N without policy backing.
• Umbrella/Excess Follow Form: Reads excess policy declarations and underlying schedules to confirm follow-form status for AI, Waiver, and P&N.
• Property Interests: Confirms ACORD 28/ACORD 27 details, subject locations, building/contents limits, and loss payee/mortgagee endorsements (e.g., CP 12 18); flags missing or incorrect mortgagee clauses.
• Description of Operations and Certificate Holder: Ensures the job, project, or premises is correctly listed; flags misaligned certificate holders or missing project identifiers, including blanket descriptors that do not meet contract specificity.

Every check is accompanied by a precise citation—click to the page where the language lives. If the endorsement is missing, Doc Chat flags the gap and optionally generates an outreach template to the broker requesting the specific form, language, or correction. That’s how you get consistent, audit-ready outcomes at any volume.

AI Audit Certificates of Insurance: How the Process Works in Practice

Doc Chat operationalizes COI compliance in a way that mirrors expert human review, then accelerates it beyond human speed. You drag-and-drop a folder of vendor onboarding documents, contracts, and COIs—or connect Doc Chat to your intake inbox, procurement system, or vendor portal. Doc Chat auto-classifies the files, associates them to the vendor and project/property, and starts the side-by-side analysis:

• It extracts the insurance requirements from the contract or insurance exhibit: coverage types, limits, AI scope (ongoing/completed ops), Primary & Noncontributory, Waiver of Subrogation, excess follow-form, notice of cancellation expectations, and any specific endorsements or carriers required.
• It reads all supplied COIs (ACORD 25/28/27), endorsements, and ACORD 101 remarks schedules, and crosschecks against the contract terms.
• It produces a pass/fail decision per requirement, with clear reasoning and citations. For example, “Completed operations AI missing: no CG 20 37 found; COI references AI but policy endorsement not provided—see ACORD 25, Description of Operations.”
• It flags lapsed or near-expiry coverages and can automatically queue reminders, renewal requests, or holds in your vendor management workflow.
• It continues to learn your preferences—how your Risk Transfer Specialists phrase exceptions, which endorsements your legal team prefers, and how you format compliance reports—ensuring institutional knowledge is finally systematized.

The Business Impact for Risk Transfer Specialists and Their Organizations

Speed, accuracy, and consistency are the headline metrics, but the downstream impact is just as important. Doc Chat ingests entire claim files and vendor folders—thousands of pages at a time—without adding headcount, moving reviews from days to minutes. That alone removes backlog during peak construction mobilizations and property renewal seasons. More strategically, the tool narrows the gap between contract risk intent and third-party performance in the field.

Time savings: Customers routinely compress multi-hour COI reviews to a few minutes. Nomad Data’s teams have demonstrated at-scale processing of approximately 250,000 document pages per minute, enabling true portfolio-wide sweeps for expired or non-compliant coverage. Research cited by Nomad shows that AI and automation commonly save professionals more than two hours per day on data entry and review tasks. When applied to COIs and endorsements, that time returns directly to risk analysis and project enablement.

Cost reduction: Automating rote COI audits cuts overtime, reduces reliance on expensive third-party reviewers during surge periods, and limits the need to scale headcount linearly with vendor growth. In Nomad’s experience, organizations often see triple-digit ROI within the first year as manual touchpoints shrink and exceptions are handled earlier in the cycle.

Accuracy and leakage reduction: Human accuracy declines as page counts rise and fatigue sets in. By contrast, AI reads page 1,500 with the same attention as page 1, ensuring fewer missed exclusions, endorsements, or date mismatches. In construction, that difference often determines whether a claim sits with the subcontractor’s policy or rebounds to the GC or owner.

Better negotiations and fewer disputes: With precise citations (e.g., “CG 24 04 Waiver not present; COI indicates Waiver only”), Risk Transfer Specialists can resolve broker conversations quickly and document defensible rationales for holds or exceptions. When disputes do arise, the audit trail supports legal and compliance review.

Why Nomad Data’s Doc Chat Is the Best Fit for COI Audits

Three reasons set Nomad Data apart for Risk Transfer Specialists tasked with COI compliance in General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners:

• Purpose-built for high-volume, high-complexity insurance documents. Doc Chat doesn’t stop at COIs—it goes into the endorsements where protection really lives and reads your contracts to align requirements and evidence. It also supports real-time Q&A across massive document sets, so you can ask, “List all vendors at 123 Main Street whose completed operations AI expires within 60 days,” and get instant, cite-backed answers.
• The Nomad process: We train Doc Chat on your playbooks, forms, and exceptions. Every organization defines “acceptable” differently—blanket vs. scheduled AI, wording equivalencies for Primary & Noncontributory, minimum AM Best ratings, and more. Doc Chat internalizes these standards so your outcomes are consistent across every project and property.
• White glove onboarding with a 1–2 week implementation timeline. Because Doc Chat is designed to work with your existing workflows, you can start with drag-and-drop document intake and graduate to API integration when ready. Nomad’s team partners with you to tailor outputs, connect to your vendor systems, and monitor early results. You are not just buying software; you are gaining a strategic partner who co-creates solutions and iterates with your needs.

To see how insurers like Great American Insurance Group accelerated complex document review with linkable, page-level citations, explore this case study recap: Reimagining Insurance Claims Management. And for a deeper dive on why automated document reasoning is not “just OCR,” see Nomad’s perspective: Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs.

Where the AI Delivers Measurable Wins

Risk Transfer Specialists can deploy Doc Chat across three recurring workstreams for immediate impact:

1) Vendor onboarding and pre-job mobilization (General Liability & Construction): As subcontractors queue up for site access, Doc Chat confirms coverage, endorsements, and limits against the contract insurance exhibit and populates a pass/fail dashboard. Exceptions are routed back to brokers with pre-filled request language (“Please provide CG 20 10 04/13 and CG 20 37 04/13 endorsements; COI alone is insufficient”).
2) Portfolio sweeps for property operations (Property & Homeowners): For snow removal, landscaping, HVAC, and security vendors roaming multiple properties, Doc Chat continuously checks renewal dates and endorsements. It can find lapsed COI coverage at scale by scanning entire vendor lists and flagging expired GL or property policies tied to prioritized locations.
3) Renewal season triage: Bulk intake all new COIs and endorsements for the upcoming year. Doc Chat auto-classifies ACORD 25/28/27, reconciles against contracts, and creates a structured exceptions list with supporting citations. Your team focuses on exceptions, not on confirming the 80% that are clean.

Security, Auditability, and Compliance You Can Trust

Any tool that reads vendor and policyholder documents must pass strict data governance and audit scrutiny. Doc Chat is built with insurer-grade controls, including SOC 2 Type 2 standards, permissioned access, and transparent, page-level explainability. Every output points back to the exact document snippet that supports it. That’s how Risk Transfer Specialists satisfy internal audit, legal, and regulatory stakeholders without slowing down the business.

As Great American Insurance Group observed, explainability is essential to adoption. In their experience with Nomad, answers arrive with clickable source pages, preserving trust and enabling rapid validation. You can read more about this ethos and its impact on adoption here: GAIG Accelerates Complex Claims with AI.

Implementation: From First File to Full Rollout in 1–2 Weeks

Doc Chat is designed to get your team productive on day one. Start with simple drag-and-drop processing—upload a set of subcontractor contracts, COIs, and endorsements—and watch the system generate compliance results with citations. During this initial phase, your Risk Transfer Specialists validate findings on known cases to build confidence. From there, Nomad’s white glove team helps you integrate with your vendor intake channel, claims or RMIS platforms, or procurement systems as needed. Typical operational rollouts take 1–2 weeks, not months.

Nomad also helps codify your unwritten rules. Many organizations discover that their best specialists follow nuanced, conditional steps that have never been documented (“If CG 20 37 is blanket but requires a written contract, verify Description of Operations includes project reference”). We interview your experts, encode those rules, and deliver a compliant, standardized process that new staff can follow on day one.

Your Real-Time Partner for COI Questions

Doc Chat is more than a batch processor—it is a real-time assistant. In practice, Risk Transfer Specialists use it interactively:

• “Summarize the COI and endorsements for Vendor X and list all Additional Insured grants with form numbers.”
• “Does the umbrella follow form for AI and Waiver?”
• “Which vendors at the Midtown property lack Primary & Noncontributory?”
• “Show any COIs where the ACORD 28 lists the wrong mortgagee.”

Answers come back instantly with the relevant page references. That means fewer back-and-forth emails, faster onboarding, and cleaner files for audit—and most importantly, fewer surprises when a claim is tendered.

How This Compares to Traditional Tools

Generic OCR or keyword-based systems struggle on variable ACORD layouts and cannot reason about what’s missing (“COI claims AI but endorsement absent”). Doc Chat understands contract context, applies ISO and custom endorsement logic, and delivers a legal-grade rationale. It’s the difference between a data finder and a compliance decision engine. As Nomad explains in Beyond Extraction, enterprise-grade document reasoning requires inference across documents—not just field scraping.

A Day in the Life: Risk Transfer Specialist, Reimagined

Morning: A new job mobilization begins on a high-rise build. Twenty subcontractors submit COIs and varied endorsement sets. Doc Chat ingests the packet, reconciles against the contract exhibit, and provides a color-coded compliance dashboard. Five vendors pass outright. Ten need endorsement copies added. Five require limits or wording changes. Outreach templates are pre-filled and sent to brokers.
Noon: Your property operations team uploads their monthly vendor sweep across 65 sites. Doc Chat identifies 37 policies expiring within 30 days, four lapsed GL policies, and one ACORD 28 listing the wrong mortgagee. Tickets are auto-created in your workflow to resolve before month-end.
Afternoon: Legal asks whether a specific subcontractor’s completed operations AI will survive closeout. Doc Chat pulls the CG 20 37 04/13 for that vendor, cites the blanket grant tied to written contract, and confirms coverage scope for completed ops through the term described. A screenshot and citation accompany the email to counsel.

Results You Can Defend—Internally and Externally

When an incident occurs and a claim is tendered, the strength of your COI program is tested. With Doc Chat, your COI audit trail shows exactly which requirements were checked and when, which endorsements were reviewed, and how exceptions were resolved. That defensibility deters disputes and supports recovery from responsible parties. It also streamlines conversations with reinsurers and auditors who increasingly expect control evidence for third-party risk in both General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners portfolios.

Frequently Asked Questions from Risk Transfer Specialists

Can Doc Chat verify Additional Insured and Waiver beyond the COI?

Yes. Doc Chat reads endorsement PDFs—CG 20 10, CG 20 37, CG 20 33, CG 24 04, and equivalents—to confirm the grant actually exists. The tool flags when the COI references AI or Waiver but the policy evidence is missing, vague, or limited to circumstances that do not meet your contract’s requirements.

What about Primary & Noncontributory?

Doc Chat searches for exact P&N wording in endorsements or policy forms. If P&N appears only in the ACORD 25, the system flags the gap and requests evidence from the broker. If the umbrella must also be P&N, Doc Chat verifies the excess follows form or identifies an endorsement that independently grants P&N.

Does Doc Chat handle Property & Homeowners evidence?

Yes. It validates ACORD 28 and ACORD 27, confirms subject locations and limits, and checks loss payee/mortgagee clauses (e.g., CP 12 18). The system also reconciles certificate holders for each property and flags inaccurate or missing addresses that may complicate loss settlement or lender requirements.

How does Doc Chat reduce workload without increasing risk?

By moving rote steps to automation while preserving human oversight for exceptions. As Nomad details in AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry, the biggest wins often come from codifying repetitive document tasks. Your specialists remain in control of approvals and waivers; Doc Chat ensures the groundwork is complete and consistent.

How fast can we get started?

Most teams begin reviewing real files on day one using drag-and-drop intake. Full operational rollouts, with custom rules and integrations, typically take 1–2 weeks thanks to Nomad’s white glove services and modern APIs. Learn more about the product here: Doc Chat for Insurance.

Embedding Your Standards: From Tribal Knowledge to Systematic Excellence

Many Risk Transfer Specialists carry a mental checklist for COI audits—what language counts as “acceptable,” which carriers are preferred, what exceptions require legal sign-off. Doc Chat captures this institutional knowledge and turns it into consistent, teachable, and defensible logic. New hires ramp faster, outcomes stabilize, and exposure is less dependent on who happens to be on the desk when a surge hits. As Nomad has written, the real opportunity is not extracting fields but teaching machines to think like your best experts. That’s how you scale vigilant risk transfer across diverse projects and properties.

Search Terms You May Be Using—All Roads Lead to the Same Solution

Whether you’re evaluating an AI audit certificates of insurance approach, shopping for a certificate of insurance compliance tool, or trying to find lapsed COI coverage at scale, the core need is identical: automate high-fidelity comparisons between contracts, COIs, endorsements, and vendor records—and do it with clear, auditable reasoning. Doc Chat was purpose-built to deliver exactly that for General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners teams.

Take the Next Step

If COI compliance is a bottleneck—or worse, a blind spot—now is the time to modernize. With Doc Chat, Risk Transfer Specialists can clear backlogs, prevent coverage gaps, and prove their program’s effectiveness with page-level evidence. Your projects mobilize faster. Your properties stay protected. And your team finally moves from paper-chasing to proactive risk management.

Explore Doc Chat for insurance teams here: https://www.nomad-data.com/doc-chat-insurance. Nomad’s white glove team can have you live in as little as 1–2 weeks.