Irish Life AI Harness creates €25.9 Million in annual capacity uplift across regulated workflows
As covered in the National Digital Awards and AI Dubliners
Summary
The Tailored AI Harness is a governed AI platform developed by Irish Life’s European Technology Team with Kreoh for regulated and guardrailed workflows including generating compliance checklists and RACI reports. It brings approved, guardrailed team knowledge into work with grounded answers, source references and human review. These workflows are described in more detail below as part of the successful Award application
Conservative working estimate places annualised capacity value for the wider rollout at €25.9 million, before the additional value created by newer specialised workflows still awaiting measurement.
At a glance
Client
Irish Life / Canada Life
Sector
Regulated insurance
Platform
Tailored AI Harness
Current working Estimate
€25.9 million in annualised capacity value for the wider rollout
User Advocacy
Net Promoter Score of 67
About Irish Life
Irish Life is an assurance, pension and investment organisation and part of Great-West Lifeco. Irish Life has relationships with more than 1.6 million people and is powered by 3,000 employees. Canada Life is also part of the wider Great-West Lifeco group.
Its 2025 Solvency and Financial Condition Report states that, between 2023 and 2025, Irish Life implemented an enterprise data platform, established data governance forums and agreed a data roadmap, “laying the foundations for AI-enabled growth and efficiency.” The report also describes how Irish Life’s ExO Hub uses strategic partnerships with startups, technology platforms and domain experts to explore next-generation technologies.
The Tailored AI Harness developed by Kreoh turns those foundations into practical enterprise AI for regulated insurance. Developed by Irish Life’s European Technology Team with Kreoh, the governed generative AI platform supports secure, retrieval-grounded workflows across claims, compliance, standards, contracts and governance, with source referencing, auditability and human review built into everyday use.
Independent recognition from the National Digital Awards also identifies Irish Life and Kreoh together in connection with the award-winning AI4A project.
The Challenge
Why a complex, regulated enterprise needs more than generic AI
Large insurance organisations handle vast amounts of confidential and commercially sensitive information, much of which cannot be entrusted to generic public AI tools. Even where those tools can assist with isolated tasks such as writing or summarising, they do not offer the tailoring, extensibility, security controls, source referencing, and traceability required for regulated work.
Irish Life also operates across deeply interconnected functions, each with its own documents, responsibilities and regulatory demands. It therefore needed a secure, shared organisational intelligence layer that could recognise repeatable patterns across the organisation while adapting to the needs of individual teams.
The Tailored AI Harness
Developed by Irish Life’s European Technology Team with Kreoh as a specialist AI workflow lab, the harness brings Irish Life’s subject-matter expertise into a secure, retrieval-grounded system. Insurance-grade source referencing connects its outputs to approved material, while pre-production evaluations, input sanitation, auditability and human review make the platform suitable for sensitive regulated work.
The platform contributes to notoriously difficult enterprise use-cases: long form regulatory texts, procurement reviews and dense internal standards. Instead of generic summaries, it produces well referenced, verifiable artefacts that drop straight into operational workflows.
Compliance teams use it to translate complex regulatory texts into structured control templates. Teams reviewing compliance heavy iSuite Standards documents report a “90 percent reduction in effort to complete iSuite standards review” with “30 to 50 percent time saving per document review” even for standards that run “100 pages long”.
The second major use case is augmented RACI construction. Teams feed the assistant large volumes of policy or regulatory documentation and receive pre-structured “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed” management mappings. Previously this required senior staff, multiple meetings and extensive rework. The AI now produces first pass charts that are 90 percent complete, which teams then refine. It has become an accelerant for governance work.
Third, the harness is used for contract analysis. Staff describe using it for “reviewing contract provisions and pulling data for assessment and compliance purposes.” This is one of the hardest tasks in enterprise AI because contract language is subtle, cumulative and risk-laden. Yet the system consistently gives compliance officers the starting materials they need.
The impact is already measurable and national in scale. Irish Life teams report faster case resolution, clearer compliance mappings, radically reduced manual document handling, and higher work satisfaction. The capacity unlocked shifts staff away from mechanical text processing and toward quality refinement and customer outcomes. The high internal satisfaction score, the rapid adoption, and the speed of roll out across jurisdictions confirm that the value is both real and durable.
The project is engineered for long-term viability. New markets, regulations or product lines can be added without architectural changes. Its explainability, auditability and risk controls make it suitable for regulated financial institutions. It scales technically and organisationally, which is why multiple business units are already embedding it into core workflows.
Subject-matter experts and super users remain closely involved through regular AI clinics and review sessions. They feed rules, examples and unsuccessful outputs back into the process, allowing Kreoh to turn practical feedback into workflow improvements, evaluation cases and release decisions. Human teams remain accountable for reviewing and using the final work.
A reusable foundation for regulated insurance
AI4A has moved beyond general writing and summarising into core operational and governance workflows across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Because those workflows share one governed foundation, new markets, regulations and product lines can be supported without rebuilding the underlying platform for every team.
The same foundation can continue to extend across customer service, human resources, actuarial work and knowledge management as new repeatable patterns are identified.
Independent recognition
National Digital Awards 2026
Irish Life and Kreoh received silver for Best New AI & ML Project at the 2026 National Digital Awards, recognising the joint teams’ work in taking secure, governed generative AI from strategy into everyday enterprise use.
Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026
The same platform was shortlisted by Qorus among 10 projects for GenAI Innovation of the Year.
The wider awards programme received 367 innovations from 171 institutions across 50 countries.