How Construction Risk Teams Are Finally Closing the Insurance Data Gap: Insights From Our 2026 User Group

Each year, our Construction User Group brings together practitioners managing some of the most complex insurance programs of any industry.

This year, the clear theme that surfaced early was that construction organizations have made real investments in risk technology, but much of their insurance program data still lives largely in spreadsheets, email threads, and manually keyed policy documents. That gap is starting to close, and the conversations from this year’s session show how.

Where the Real Friction Lives 

Construction risk professionals carry a lot:

• Active job sites.
• Shifting payroll.
• Subcontractors cycling in and out.
• Multi-carrier wrap programs.
• Project-level coverage.
• Enterprise-wide programs.

The attendees at this year’s group represented that complexity well, with organizations managing everything from rolling CCIP programs to large-scale subcontractor compliance operations.

The common thread across their experiences was where the friction lived. Practitioners shared they had invested in a RMIS for claims and incident management, but the insurance side of the program, like renewals, placements, endorsements, and policy data management, was still being run through tools that hadn’t kept pace.

For construction risk teams specifically, that gap carries real consequences. Decisions get made based on incomplete information, coordination overhead eats into strategic time, and the full picture of program performance stays out of reach.

After the Renewal: Where the Manual Work Begins 

One of the session’s client showcases illustrated this challenge well. A large national subcontractor described what their risk program looked like before centralizing their data:

• Claims tracked across spreadsheets.
• Policies stored on network drives.
• Subcontractor certificates of insurance monitored by hand.
• Bond requests handled through PDF forms and email.

Their team was spending significant time on administrative coordination that generated little strategic value.

Several attendees immediately recognized the challenge of getting insurance data into a usable state after a renewal. Even after the renewal is complete, someone still has to work through binders, policy documents, endorsements, and carrier materials to pull out limits, deductibles, premiums, and coverage details. Until that work is done, it’s hard to answer basic questions like what is actually covered on a given project or what the current deductible structure looks like.

AI-powered policy data ingestion addresses this directly. Teams can upload policy and quote documents and have the key data extracted and structured automatically in the platform. The practical effect goes beyond efficiency. Insurance data becomes available earlier in the policy lifecycle, giving teams time to analyze their programs rather than rebuild them from scratch in a spreadsheet after every renewal.

When Projects Change, Insurance Has to Keep Up

Construction programs don’t stay static. Projects add scope, payroll estimates shift, equipment gets added, job sites close early or run long. Each of those changes carries insurance implications, and tracking them has historically meant maintaining a separate record of mid-term endorsements alongside the base policy documentation.

A poll question put to the group reinforced this reality When asked which process would benefit most from end-to-end lifecycle tracking, subcontractor compliance came back as the clear top priority. Managing onboarding, certificates of insurance (COIs), renewals, and approvals across a constantly rotating contractor base is one of the most time-intensive parts of the job.

The client showcase reflected that reality. Their team had been monitoring subcontractor COIs manually, with expiration tracking done in spreadsheets and follow-up handled by hand. Automating that process freed up meaningful staff capacity and redirected it toward higher-value work. That included tiered reminders at 60, 30, and zero days, with a workflow that flagged lapsed certificates before payments were released.

For endorsement tracking, having a complete history of what changed, when it changed, and the financial impact on premiums and limits gives teams a far more accurate read on how project activity is shaping their program across the year.

Renewal Season: Coordinating Across Teams and Tools

Several attendees described renewal season as the most coordination-intensive stretch of the year. Risk management leads the process, but finance, project teams, brokers, and carriers all hold information that has to come together at the right time. Waiting on payroll projections, collecting updated project values, managing approvals, and keeping everyone aligned creates significant coordination overhead, where a missed deadline can have real consequences.

For organizations managing OCIP and CCIP programs, that coordination becomes even more complex. Questions came up in the session around how to structure access for broker partners, how to manage the placement workflow for large rolling programs, and how to make quote comparison more systematic when evaluating multiple carrier options across a complex program.

Placement management approaches this as a structured project management problem. Centralized tasks, timelines, documents, and approvals are handled within a single workspace, so everyone involved knows what they own and where things stand.

Paired with side-by-side quote comparison, the goal is to give teams greater visibility into their options and reduce the time spent assembling information from disconnected sources before a decision can be made.

What the Group Is Building Toward

The most forward-looking part of the session centered on where practitioners want to take their programs next. One organization shared that their next milestone is implementing total cost of risk (TCOR) visibility: pulling together premiums, claims spend, administrative costs, and operational data to give finance and executive leadership a full picture of what the risk program actually costs and what it delivers. That kind of visibility requires the data infrastructure to already be in place.

What came through during the session is that the organizations making the most progress share a common approach. They treat their RMIS as the central platform for all risk data, connecting it to HR, fleet, subcontractor management, and now insurance program data. The result is a platform that gives the risk function a single version of the truth and a foundation the departments that depend on it can build from.

Explore how Origami Risk’s Insurance Program Management solution was built to support this kind of connected program. By bringing policy data ingestion, endorsement tracking, placement management, and quote comparison into the same platform where clients already manage claims, incidents, and subcontractor compliance, construction risk teams can manage the full insurance program lifecycle without rebuilding context every time they switch tools.