Facilities managers can ensure their vendors have adequate liability insurance to conduct on-site work with newly available technology from Visitt, a building operations platform serving the commercial real estate space.
The company has launched an AI agent that it says can automate the management of certificates of insurance without any manual input from facility staff.
Building operators rely on COIs to know their vendors are properly insured for the work they’re doing, but it can be time-consuming for facility staff to ensure all of the COIs of their vendors are sufficient for the work they’re doing and are in compliance with insurance rules.
“There are many moving parts of compliance, such as expiring and missing certificates of insurance,” says Alicia Frazier, senior manager at Building Engines, a JLL property management software company. “It’s difficult to know everything that’s going on at any given time. Much less real-time updates.”
For facility managers, the COI renewal process is very manual today, says Jonathan Kroll, co-founder of Visitt. The process requires facility staff to remind vendors or tenants that they need to renew, follow up on responses and then manually verify the accuracy of the files.
“The verification task is very binary, either it meets the requirements or doesn’t,” Kroll said in an interview.
It’s the binary character of the verification process that makes it “great ground for AI to take over,” he said.
Visitt’s new AI agent automatically extracts insurance requirements from contracts and checks incoming COIs for compliance, according to the company. That removes the need for manual review, guess work, oversight and time-consuming back-and-forth, it says.
“Obviously there are certain communication aspects that you would like to delegate to a human or escalate to a human,” Kroll said. “Also, the final verification after the AI will be done by a human. But moving forward, I’m sure once the technology is more improved, people will feel fine with delegating the task to an AI, because they will not be scared for their job anymore and understand that they have a lot of other stuff to do.”
Maintenance and lifecycle management
The COI agent builds on Visitt’s existing platform for helping building operators streamline work orders and manage preventative maintenance, tenant operations and amenities.
The company sees the COI application as the start of a phase in which intelligent, self-directed capabilities will become part of broader building operations.
“This milestone release is the first of a team of fully automated agents,” Kroll said in a statement. “It is a direct response to what property teams have been asking for: real, end-to-end automation that reduces administrative load without sacrificing accuracy or compliance, so teams can focus on what really matters – running their buildings efficiently and serving tenants better.”
Preventative maintenance and equipment lifecycle management are two areas that Visitt plans to release future AI agents for, Kroll said.
A vast amount of data in the property management system – including inspection and maintenance notes and photos – is being recorded in the company’s platform that can be leveraged, he said.
“All of this data is very valuable in order to determine the health and condition of a certain asset,” Kroll said. “Everything under preventative maintenance and equipment management, we see a lot of value in. These are very straightforward use cases, like COI management, and can save a lot of time.”
