For decades, subrogation has been treated as an afterthought.

A file closed, a claim paid and only then, sometimes months later, would a carrier’s recovery team begin its work. Beyond this, traditional journeys to recovery have been hindered by manual processes and inaccessible data, which have left significant claims uncollected.

AI and automation have promised to transform recovery processes, but carriers must consider critical questions in order to use the technologies to strategically and safely leverage them for subrogation. What does responsible innovation in AI look like, and how can companies balance that innovation with operational discipline to ensure compliance while redefining the role of subrogation in underwriting profitability?

Embedding AI Correctly: The Four Pillars

The future of subrogation lies not in choosing between autonomous agents or proven platforms but in combining both.

To effectively embed AI with process discipline, carriers should focus on four key pillars:

1. Early identification and segmentation: Use predictive modeling on unstructured data (adjuster notes, police reports, invoicing) to surface subrogation potential earlier in the claim life cycle and to identify recovery opportunities that would otherwise languish.
2. Workflow orchestration and prioritization: AI-driven tools should support routing claims to the appropriate path: some may be handled by low‑touch automation, others require vendor escalation or legal arbitration. Without orchestration, automation can create bottlenecks rather than relief.
3. Governance, auditability and data integrity: As AI takes on more decision-making, carriers must embed audit trails, human-in-the-loop checkpoints and analytics monitoring to avoid bias, regulatory issues or unintended escalations.
4. Training AI appropriately: Another key consideration is how AI agents are trained. Effective AI does not require exposure to sensitive client data. Instead, models should be trained and tuned on operational data already within the claims or subrogation platform. This ensures carriers can leverage sophisticated intelligence without compromising confidentiality or control. Well-trained models, grounded in historical operational data, can reason consistently across claims at scale, helping identify opportunities and support decision-making.

Why Execution at Scale Matters

Subrogation success is ultimately measured in hard outcomes such as recovery dollars, arbitration win ratios and lower cost-to-recover. The carriers achieving these measurable results are those that have built operational maturity and executional scale.

When subrogation workflows are standardized and repeatable, the benefits compound: predictability improves, compliance is easier to enforce across jurisdictions, and segmentation models direct claims to the right resources based on complexity. It’s equally important that every recovery interaction generates data that can be used to refine future models and workflows.

This disciplined foundation is what allows innovation to take hold. When AI is embedded into processes that already operate at scale, the results are amplified—cycle times drop, leakage is reduced, and recovery rates improve in tangible, measurable ways.

Best Practices and Strategy for Carriers

Subrogation is no longer just a claims‑cleanup task—it has become a strategic avenue for value creation. Carriers have every opportunity to elevate subrogation from a back-office recovery task to a strategic profit lever that drives underwriting performance, combined-ratio management and customer experience.

This begins with building process maturity by mapping workflows, aligning vendor incentives, cleaning data and setting clear metrics before layering in automation. Success also depends on tracking meaningful KPIs, such as the share of claims with subrogation potential identified and pursued.

By combining proven operational platforms with incremental AI or agentic capabilities, as well as responsible AI practices, transparent decision logic, auditability, controlled vendor data usage and regulatory alignment, carriers can ensure that technology amplifies outcomes both safely and sustainably.