Archipelago Analytics
AI-driven commercial property risk platform

Large commercial property owners with multiple locations have voluminous amounts of documents and data that they use to manage their risks. Much of the information must be forwarded to brokers and insurers, a traditionally time-consuming and inefficient way of making sure underwriters have accurate property details.

Archipelago Analytics Inc. created its artificial intelligence-driven commercial property risk platform seeking to end the often duplicative and costly tasks needed to locate and transmit such risk data.

The platform is in place at some of the world’s largest commercial property owners, helping them gather and distribute the information insurers need, said Hemant Shah, CEO of San Francisco-based Archipelago. 

“Rather than hunting down information, asking people questions, updating spreadsheets and reading documents, we’ve mapped out a life-cycle model for a physical property,” that risk managers can add to their loss control arsenal, he said.

Archipelago’s platform maintains and manages detailed information on a property owner’s various locations. “All the different details about each and every single one of their physical assets, ranging from detailed information about its location and localized hazards, to information about the construction of the building, roof systems, fire-protection systems” and much more, Mr. Shah said.

The documentation that property owners compile throughout the life of a building includes details about construction, repairs, maintenance, engineering and other information about the structure’s history, he said. “We make it really easy to tap into those original source documents and use machine learning to extract and connect all the pertinent data about those assets,” he said.

That makes managing the risks around properties much easier, according to Mr. Shah. For example, instead of conversations with a due diligence team to sort out information on an acquired property that needs to be listed as an insured asset, a risk manager can send a link through Archipelago that allows documents related to the acquisition to be uploaded. The platform then extracts the necessary information from the records and arranges it for the risk manager.

“They can not only make more proactive decisions internally about how they view the risk and exposure of their physical assets,” Mr. Shah said, “but they also are able to share permission via the Archipelago platform for access to those rich data sets by all of their insurance partners.”