Automated Certificate of Insurance Audits for General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners — Ensuring Compliance and Reducing Third-Party Risk

For Compliance Analysts in General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners, certificates of insurance (COIs) are both indispensable and deceptively risky. The volume is staggering—thousands of ACORD 25s and ACORD 28s arriving from subcontractors, tenants, vendors, and property managers—each with different carriers, dates, endorsements, and terms. A single lapsed policy or missing Additional Insured endorsement can expose the named insured to costly litigation, uncovered losses, or disputes with owners and lenders. The challenge is clear: continuously validate third-party insurance at scale without bottlenecking operations.

Nomad Data’s Doc Chat for Insurance solves this by acting as an AI-powered, certificate of insurance compliance tool that reads, reasons, and cross-checks COIs and supporting policy documents against your contracts and risk transfer playbook. It’s purpose-built to AI audit certificates of insurance and find lapsed COI coverage at scale, flagging non-compliance in minutes and documenting every decision with page-level citations so your compliance determinations are fast, defensible, and repeatable.

The Compliance Analyst’s COI Problem in GL & Construction and Property & Homeowners

In General Liability & Construction, prime contractors and developers shoulder contractual risk transfer obligations across a complex web of subcontractors. Property owners and managers—spanning commercial portfolios and Homeowners/Condo associations—face similar risk transfer requirements for tenants, vendors, and service providers ranging from landscapers to roofers.

COIs are merely evidence; they don’t confer coverage. The real risk hides in the underlying forms and endorsements. In practice, that means Compliance Analysts must go beyond the ACORD form to confirm that the policy actually provides what the contract requires.

Common pain points include:

• Variability in document quality: ACORD 25 and ACORD 28 forms arrive as scans, screenshots, or edited PDFs with inconsistent fidelity.
• Hidden exceptions in endorsements: Additional Insured status might be limited to ongoing operations or exclude completed ops; Waiver of Subrogation might only apply with special wording or premium paid; Primary & Non-Contributory might be missing or narrowly drafted.
• Contract-to-coverage mismatches: Insurance exhibits in master service agreements (MSAs), leases, or subcontractor agreements change per project or jurisdiction, making one-size-fits-all COI tracking unreliable.
• Scale and timeliness: Thousands of COIs must be reviewed at onboarding and during renewal windows—missing a single expiration date can mean uncovered incidents.
• Portfolio complexity: For Property & Homeowners, you must verify coverage for each tenant or unit owner, enforce HOA requirements (HO-6 with loss assessment coverage, liability limits, and named association), and track vendors who come onsite.

Beyond the ACORD, you’re reconciling details across ISO forms and endorsements such as CG 00 01 (Commercial General Liability), CG 20 10 and CG 20 37 (Additional Insured—ongoing and completed operations), CG 24 04 (Waiver of Transfer of Rights), Primary & Non-Contributory endorsements, and property forms like CP 00 10 (Building and Personal Property) with Evidence of Commercial Property Insurance via ACORD 28. Errors, omissions, and a constantly changing ecosystem of forms make COI audits a prime candidate for expert automation.

How COI Compliance is Handled Manually Today

Most teams maintain a spreadsheet or a COI repository. Analysts race to read each document, verify key fields, and compare them to contract requirements. It’s slow, repetitive, and vulnerable to human error—especially during peak onboarding and renewal cycles.

A typical manual process looks like this:

• Collect third-party documents: ACORD 25 (Certificate of Liability Insurance), ACORD 28 (Evidence of Commercial Property Insurance), policy declarations, endorsement schedules, specialty endorsements (e.g., Additional Insured forms CG 20 10/CG 20 37, Waiver of Subrogation), auto declarations, workers’ compensation certificates, and umbrella/excess dec pages.
• Compare to contract agreements: Insurance exhibits within MSAs, subcontractor agreements, lease addenda, vendor onboarding documents, HOA/COA rules, and project-specific insurance requirements.
• Validate by hand: Confirm insured name, carrier, AM Best rating, policy number, effective/expiration dates, per occurrence and aggregate limits, operations/locations/vehicles, Additional Insured evidence, Primary & Non-Contributory wording, Waiver of Subrogation, Completed Operations coverage, and cancellation provisions.
• Track expirations: Create calendar reminders, send renewal chasers, and manually re-validate new submissions against the same requirements.
• Escalate exceptions: Route disputed findings to risk transfer specialists or legal for interpretation of ambiguous endorsements.

This manual approach strains even the best teams. Backlogs build, lapsed policies slip through, and documentation for audits is inconsistent. The result: elevated third-party risk, greater claims leakage, and costly disputes when incidents occur.

What a Best-Practice COI Review Actually Checks

Whether you manage a construction project or a Class A office tower, the control points are similar. A modern, defensible COI review validates and reconciles across multiple document types and requirements:

Core COI checks (ACORD 25 / ACORD 28):

• Insured and certificate holder names, addresses, and relationships
• Carrier names and NAIC codes; optional minimum financial strength (e.g., A- VII)
• Policy numbers, effective and expiration dates; retroactive dates where applicable
• Limits: GL occurrence, GL aggregate, products/completed ops aggregate, personal/advertising injury, fire damage, medical payments
• Auto (symbol coverage and CSL), Workers’ Compensation (statutory) and Employers’ Liability
• Umbrella/Excess limits and whether they follow form
• Property: building, contents, BI/EE; Evidence via ACORD 28 or ACORD 24; special hazards (wind/hail, flood, quake)
• Cancellation language and notice requirements (as stated vs. actual policy obligations)

Contract-compliance checks across endorsements and forms:

• Additional Insured for ongoing and completed operations (CG 20 10 + CG 20 37 or equivalent blanket forms)
• Primary & Non-Contributory provision applicable to the work and project
• Waiver of Subrogation (GL/Auto/WC/Property as required)
• Completed Operations through the warranty period; no residential exclusions for construction where applicable
• Designated work exclusions (contracting, roofing, EIFS) and project-specific exclusions
• Per project or per location aggregate endorsements
• Tenants/HOA requirements: HO-4/HO-6 evidence, liability limits, loss assessment coverage, and named association as additional interest

Performing this rigor by hand across thousands of COIs is where manual processing breaks. The scale and complexity demand automation.

Doc Chat: An AI-Powered Certificate of Insurance Compliance Tool

Doc Chat by Nomad Data is a suite of insurance-specialized AI agents trained on your exact insurance requirements and portfolio risk profiles. It ingests entire claim and compliance files, including COIs, policy declarations, endorsement schedules, and the contract agreements and vendor onboarding documents that define what “compliant” means in your environment. Then it answers compliance questions instantly, with page-level citations back to the precise clause or endorsement language.

Highlights:

• Volume at speed: Ingest thousands of pages (entire vendor or tenant packages) in minutes—no added headcount.
• Complexity mastered: Reads dense, inconsistent policies to surface exclusions, endorsements, trigger language, and ambiguous terms that affect risk transfer.
• Real-time Q&A: Ask “Does this vendor’s GL meet the Additional Insured—completed ops requirement?” or “List all policies expiring in the next 30 days for Tower B” and get immediate answers with citations.
• Thorough & complete: Finds every reference to coverage, liability, and endorsements across COIs, declarations, and contracts—so you don’t miss a requirement.
• Customized to your playbook: We encode your insurance exhibits, thresholds (e.g., $1M/$2M GL + $5M umbrella), and jurisdictional nuances, delivering determinations aligned to your standards.

The result is a pragmatic, auditable way to AI audit certificates of insurance at enterprise scale—without losing the nuance of real-world endorsement language.

How It Works: From Manual COI Review to Automated, Auditable Compliance

1) Ingest all relevant documents

Analysts drag-and-drop or auto-ingest via SFTP/API the full package: ACORD 25, ACORD 28 (or 24), policy dec pages, endorsement schedules, specimen forms, contract agreements (MSAs, subcontracts, leases), and vendor onboarding documents. Doc Chat normalizes scanned PDFs, images, and native documents.

2) Extract and normalize critical fields

Doc Chat captures insured names, policy numbers, dates, limits, carrier, NAIC, and all stated special provisions from the COI. It simultaneously parses policy dec pages and endorsements to verify that the COI’s assertions are backed by actual forms (e.g., CG 20 10 12 19, CG 20 37 12 19; blanket AI schedules; Waiver of Subrogation; Primary & Non-Contributory).

3) Cross-check against contractual requirements

The system compares each field to the specific insurance exhibit in the governing agreement. It recognizes project-specific requirements (per project aggregate, completed ops through 3 years) and line-of-business variants (e.g., Property & Homeowners needing HO-6 with loss assessment coverage and named association as additional interest).

4) Surface exceptions with citations

Doc Chat creates a structured compliance report: pass/fail per requirement, the reason, the exact source page, and suggested remediation (e.g., “Require CG 20 37 endorsement for completed operations” or “Obtain Primary & Non-Contributory endorsement for GL”). Exception handling can be pushed to workflow tools or back to vendors/tenants automatically.

5) Monitor expirations and find lapsed COI coverage at scale

Expirations are tracked portfolio-wide. Upcoming renewals trigger reminders; new submissions are auto-validated; if coverage lapses, the named insured is alerted with the risk context and relevant contract clause.

6) Real-time Q&A and reporting

Compliance Analysts can ask open-ended questions across the entire document set: “Which subcontractors lack Waiver of Subrogation on WC?” “List any property policies with wind/hail deductibles exceeding our maximum.” Answers include citations to the exact page, de-risking audits and internal reviews.

Use Cases Across GL & Construction and Property & Homeowners

General Liability & Construction

On a multi-year project, Doc Chat continuously validates subcontractor COIs and endorsements. It confirms AI status for ongoing and completed ops, Primary & Non-Contributory language, required umbrella limits, and flags exclusions that could bar coverage (e.g., residential exclusions for mixed-use projects). Project-specific aggregates are validated, and all changes are logged to support owner audits.

Property & Homeowners

For a property portfolio or HOA/COA, Doc Chat confirms tenant/owner compliance (evidence of HO-4/HO-6, personal liability limits, loss assessment coverage), verifies vendors who come onsite (GL, Auto, WC, umbrella), and ensures the association or property owner is correctly listed as the certificate holder or additional interest as required. It tracks expirations and alerts property managers to lapsed policies before exposure rises.

Advanced Checks the ACORD Alone Can’t Guarantee

Because a COI can be incomplete or even inaccurate, Doc Chat dives into the supporting policy documents to validate what matters:

• Additional Insured: Confirms blanket or scheduled AI endorsements extend to the named insured, cover ongoing and completed operations, and apply to the scope of work described.
• Primary & Non-Contributory: Verifies wording and identifies any limitations or conditions that could subordinate your coverage.
• Waiver of Subrogation: Checks GL, Auto, WC, and Property endorsements for the waiver’s applicability by project or entity, including any premium or contractual requirement triggers.
• Per Project/Location Aggregate: Validates aggregate endorsements align with project or property-level requirements.
• Exclusions: Detects work-type exclusions (e.g., EIFS, roofing, height/tract-home limitations) and additional hazards that contradict the contract’s risk transfer intent.
• Umbrella/Excess Follow-Form: Confirms excess layers truly follow form and don’t introduce new exclusions that remove the benefit of the primary policy’s endorsements.
• Property Deductibles and Special Perils: Flags wind/hail, flood, and quake deductibles beyond your thresholds and notes coinsurance or valuation terms (RCV vs. ACV).

This is the kind of nuanced review that manual teams struggle to reproduce consistently at volume. It’s also why purpose-built AI outperforms generic OCR or rules-only solutions. For deeper context on why inference across unstructured documents matters, see Nomad’s perspective in Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs.

“Find Lapsed COI Coverage at Scale”: Continuous Monitoring and Renewal Automation

COI review isn’t a one-time task. Policies expire mid-project or mid-lease. Limits and endorsements change at renewal. Doc Chat continuously monitors expirations and compares newly submitted certificates and dec pages to prior-year requirements and your master playbook.

Capabilities include:

• Automated renewal chasers: Vendor or tenant gets a friendly, rules-based request with exactly what endorsements, limits, and forms to submit (e.g., “Please include CG 20 37 for completed ops and verify Primary & Non-Contributory”).
• Delta checks year over year: Flags reduced limits, removed endorsements, added exclusions, or changes in carrier financial strength.
• Real-time dashboards: Portfolio views by property, project, vendor class, or geography to identify risk concentrations and aging non-compliance.
• Exception routing: Non-compliant renewals are routed to Procurement, Legal, or Risk for quick remediation with pre-drafted ask language.

In other words, you don’t just track expirations—you actually prevent coverage gaps before they increase your loss exposure.

The Business Impact: Time, Cost, and Accuracy

When Compliance Analysts use Doc Chat as their certificate of insurance compliance tool, three measurable outcomes follow:

1) Time savings

Doc Chat ingests and reviews entire document packets in minutes, consolidating a day’s worth of reading into a rapid, consistent analysis. In complex claim and medical-file contexts, Nomad has demonstrated order-of-magnitude speed-ups; see The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks and Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation for benchmarks. The same engine powers COI audits, delivering similarly outsized gains.

2) Cost reduction

By automating repetitive extraction, validation, and exception routing, teams reduce overtime, reliance on third-party reviewers, and rework. As described in AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry, clients regularly achieve rapid ROI by turning manual document processing into a background process that “just happens.”

3) Accuracy and defensibility

AI doesn’t get tired on page 300. It quotes the exact endorsement, highlights limitations, and cites the page. That audit trail protects your decisions with regulators, owners, and lenders. The “page-level explainability” emphasized in our Great American Insurance Group webinar recap is equally vital for compliance.

Security, Governance, and Audit Readiness

COIs, contracts, and policy forms include sensitive data. Nomad Data operates under robust security controls, including SOC 2 Type 2. Every AI-derived answer is tied to its source, so your organization can demonstrate how determinations were made and what language supported them. That’s a key differentiator from black-box systems and a reason internal audit, compliance, and legal stakeholders support Doc Chat deployments.

Why Nomad Data: The Nomad Process, White Glove Service, and 1–2 Week Implementation

Doc Chat isn’t one-size-fits-all. Our process trains the system on your exact documents and requirements—your insurance exhibits, your minimum limits, your preferred wording for Primary & Non-Contributory, your HO-6 loss assessment requirements, your project-specific nuances. Then we deploy quickly:

• White glove onboarding: We interview your Compliance Analysts and risk transfer leaders, codify unwritten rules, and tune outputs to your workflows.
• Rapid time-to-value: Users can start same-day with drag-and-drop. Typical production integrations complete in 1–2 weeks using modern APIs without upheaval.
• Co-creation mindset: We evolve with your team, adding new checks, data sources, and reports as your portfolio and risk appetite change.

Most organizations don’t have AI as a core skill—which is why they choose a partner. With Nomad, you’re not just getting software; you’re getting a specialized, evolving solution built around your compliance realities.

Where Doc Chat Fits in Your Operating Model

Doc Chat connects upstream with vendor onboarding and downstream with procurement, property management, and legal workflows:

• Onboarding: Vendor onboarding documents (W-9/W-8, hold harmless agreements, MSAs) are reviewed alongside COIs. Missing elements trigger automated requests.
• Active monitoring: Expiring policies generate renewal requests and automated, AI-guided checklists of required endorsements for the next term.
• Dispute resolution: When a counterparty pushes back, Doc Chat supplies the specific contract clause and endorsement language needed to justify the requirement.
• Portfolio analytics: Leaders can visualize compliance rates by trade, vendor tier, building, or GC/owner to optimize risk transfer strategy.

Examples: GL & Construction and Property & Homeowners

Construction Project: Tenant Improvement with Roofing Component

A GC requires $1M/$2M GL, $1M Auto, Statutory WC + $1M EL, and $5M Umbrella. Contract requires AI for ongoing and completed ops, Primary & Non-Contributory, Waiver of Subrogation, per-project aggregate, and no residential exclusion.

Doc Chat verifies:

• ACORD 25 matches the insured name and project description
• CG 20 10 and CG 20 37 endorsements (or blanket equivalents) are present and applicable
• Primary & Non-Contributory endorsement applies to the project
• Umbrella follows form and doesn’t introduce roofing exclusions
• Carrier ratings meet minimum thresholds
• Expiration dates align with project milestones; renewals scheduled 30–60 days in advance

Commercial Property: Vendor Access and Tenant Requirements

A property manager requires on-site vendors to carry GL, Auto, WC, and umbrella with AI and Waiver of Subrogation. Tenants must show HO-4/HO-6 with personal liability and loss assessment coverage, and list the landlord or association appropriately.

Doc Chat confirms:

• Vendor COIs and endorsements meet the building’s risk transfer standards
• Tenant HO-6 includes minimum liability and loss assessment coverage
• Association or landlord is listed per lease or bylaws as additional interest
• Policy expirations are monitored; non-compliance escalates to property management

From Compliance Bottleneck to Competitive Advantage

When COI audits move from manual to automated with Doc Chat, cycle times shrink and consistency increases. Your Compliance Analysts spend their time resolving meaningful exceptions and improving contract templates—not rekeying dates or chasing missing checkboxes. The organization gains stronger negotiating leverage, less claims leakage, and fewer disputes around whether coverage was in place and applicable.

It also unlocks proactive risk management. Doc Chat’s portfolio view reveals patterns: trades that routinely fail to maintain completed ops, regions where wind/hail deductibles exceed your thresholds, or vendors whose carriers drop below acceptable ratings. You can then refine your requirements or negotiate alternatives before problems escalate.

Implementation Playbook

Getting started is straightforward:

1. Define requirements: We capture your contract exhibits and preferred endorsements/wording across General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners.
2. Seed with real files: Load historical COIs, policy docs, and contracts. We tune Doc Chat to your edge cases and exceptions.
3. Pilot and validate: Run a controlled set of vendors or properties. Confirm accuracy and calibrate exception routing.
4. Scale: Enable auto-ingestion via SFTP/API, connect to your vendor/tenant systems, and roll out dashboards.
5. Expand: Add lines (e.g., Professional, Pollution), enrich with external data, and extend to related workflows (policy audits, claims intake, and fraud detection).

Because the platform is flexible, many teams start with drag-and-drop reviews before integrating. This lets you realize value immediately while IT aligns long-term automation.

Answers to Common Questions

Does Doc Chat rely only on the COI?

No. It reads the COI, the policy dec pages, and endorsements. It ties determinations back to form and endorsement language—essential for Additional Insured, Primary & Non-Contributory, Waiver of Subrogation, per project aggregates, and exclusions.

Can it detect tampering or inconsistent data?

It flags anomalies (e.g., mismatched policy numbers across documents, text layering in PDFs suggestive of edits, or material deviations from prior submissions). Optional external checks can corroborate carrier status and NAIC details.

How does it help during audits?

Every pass/fail decision includes a citation to the exact clause or page. Auditors can click directly to the source. This page-level explainability mirrors approaches our clients use for complex claims; see our GAIG webinar recap.

What about data security?

Nomad Data maintains SOC 2 Type 2 controls, and we design deployments to meet your data governance standards. Outputs are fully traceable.

How quickly can we implement?

Analysts can begin same day in a sandbox environment. Typical production integrations complete in 1–2 weeks, supported by our white glove team.

Why Now

The COI challenge won’t shrink. Vendor ecosystems are expanding, contract requirements are diverging, and owners/lenders are demanding stronger proof of risk transfer. Waiting means higher administrative load and greater exposure to gaps in coverage.

With an AI solution explicitly designed to AI audit certificates of insurance and find lapsed COI coverage at scale, Compliance Analysts can convert COI review from a bottleneck into a strategic capability that protects the enterprise and accelerates operations.

Take the Next Step

See Doc Chat in action as your certificate of insurance compliance tool. Load a sample of vendor or tenant files—COIs, endorsements, and contract exhibits—and ask the questions you wrestle with daily. Experience instant, cited answers across massive document sets and understand why carriers and claims organizations rely on the same core technology for high-stakes review.

Learn more and schedule a tailored walkthrough of Doc Chat for Insurance. Explore related perspectives in our resource library, including Beyond Extraction, AI’s Untapped Goldmine, and Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI.

About Nomad Data’s Doc Chat
Doc Chat is a suite of purpose-built AI agents for insurance that automate end‑to‑end document review, claims summaries, legal & demand review, intake and data extraction, policy audits, and proactive fraud detection. It’s trained on your playbooks and standards, enabling consistent, defensible decisions at scale—so Compliance Analysts in General Liability & Construction and Property & Homeowners can focus on meaningful risk management, not manual data entry.