From inbox to insight: how global insurance leader Aon is leveraging Docusign’s smart repository to generate new business value

For global insurance leader Aon opens in a new tab, documents are where the work happens. Every policy, proposal, binder, endorsement, and certificate represents a commitment to a client, and a moment where colleagues, clients, carriers, and brokers need to work together quickly and accurately.

Working with Docusign, Aon is turning those documents into business value. By moving to a Docusign-first document repository and designing new ways for clients and colleagues to work side by side, Aon is building toward a connected client service where every insurance workflow, from onboarding and placement to renewals and policy servicing, moves faster, with fewer errors and less manual effort.

The value shows up across the business: faster turnaround on client deliverables, one trusted version of every document, real-time visibility into where work stands, secure sharing in place of email attachments, and a structured data foundation that makes AI genuinely useful at enterprise scale. Most importantly, colleagues get time back to spend on what clients value most: expert advice.

The challenge: valuable information, scattered everywhere

As businesses grow, so do the risks they face: more property, greater potential liability, and bigger impact from disruptions across the supply chain. Standard insurance policies often aren't enough. Companies need customized coverage that brings together multiple carriers and specialized terms to protect their business.

As one of the world's leading insurance brokers and professional services firms, Aon helps organizations build and manage complex insurance programs across 120 countries. A key element of operations is dealing with the millions of pages of contracts needed to manage relationships between insurers and the insured. Beyond the sheer volume of documents, Aon’s continued growth further challenged everyday processes, with documents becoming more disconnected and scattered across multiple legacy servers, desktops, and emails. This made valuable business information inaccessible, and Aon colleagues could spend hours scouring files to find the dates or policy numbers they need. And when a client asked a simple question, “Where are we?”, the answer often had to be pieced together from inboxes, shared drives, and multiple systems.

Rather than simply replacing aging technology, Aon launched an ambitious initiative designed to transform how documents support Aon clients and colleagues alike. Working with Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), the company is combining highly specialized agreement AI with a centralized repository, structured data, and central workflows to establish a connected, data-driven document experience. Instead of simply using AI to analyze individual documents, Aon can turn information trapped inside millions of documents into structured business data that colleagues can search, manage, and put to work. 

Unlocking decades of insurance knowledge

Insurance policies can exceed 300 pages, with brokers, carriers, clients, and internal teams collaborating through multiple revisions before coverage is finalized. Historically, much of this work went through email. Colleagues downloaded any documents they wanted to maintain, SharePoint storing them across legacy repositories, shared drives, and local folders. When colleagues wanted to check on documents, they often needed to search multiple systems and carefully compare versions to find the most current copy. Duplicate copies multiplied, it was hard to know which version was final, and there was no easy way to see who had changed a document, or when. That added up to hours that could have been spent working with clients. 

Raju Debroy, Global Head of AI Platform and Engineering at Aon, describes this as the “data in darkness” challenge: “This challenge isn’t simply about extracting information from documents. It’s about transforming information trapped across millions of documents into structured, actionable intelligence. By connecting and comparing information across thousands of clients’ documents, AI will enable colleagues to uncover new insights and opportunities.” 

With Docusign IAM, modernizing document management became an opportunity to transform historical documents into structured, searchable business assets that help colleagues make better decisions and become trusted advisors for clients.

What’s live: a Docusign-first document foundation

Aon has already laid the foundation. For North America Commercial Risk, Aon moved approximately 50 million documents to a Docusign Smart Document Repository across the systems colleagues use every day.

With documents in one place, Aon is also applying AI extraction to identify document types and capture key details such as policy numbers, effective dates, and carrier information, making documents searchable by what’s inside them, not just where they’re stored.

“This initiative is more than a repository migration,” said Amardeep Singh, Product Engineering Manager, Aon. “It establishes Docusign as the strategic document platform for NA Commercial Risk, enabling us to modernize how we manage nearly 50 million documents while minimizing risk, preserving application continuity, and creating a foundation for future smart-document capabilities.”

What’s next: a shared workspace with clients

Next, Aon is replacing fragmented, email-driven workflows with a shared workspace with clients. Aon and Docusign are designing new tools within Meridian that bring together capabilities from Docusign Workspaces and Docusign Requests into a connected client service experience. Clients and colleagues will be able to request, share, review, comment on, and approve documents in one secure place, with a clear record of every version and change.

Instead of chasing attachments across inboxes, clients and colleagues will work from one trusted version of each document. Docusign Generation will help colleagues prepare client documents faster and more consistently, while Docusign’s Monitor APIs, strengthen governance, show who accessed or changed a document and when, and keep document data moving securely across Aon’s broader technology ecosystem. 

As the platform continues to mature, Aon plans to expand its use of Docusign Workflow Builder to automate client onboarding, placement, renewals, certificates, endorsements, and other high-volume insurance workflows, creating faster and more consistent experiences for clients and colleagues.

“We’re not just moving documents to a new system,” said Aarthi Janakiraman, Product Manager for Document Management, Aon. “We’re designing it alongside colleagues and clients who use it every day. Every capability we build starts with a real insurance workflow and a simple question: how do we help our colleagues spend less time chasing documents and more time advising clients?” 

The art of the possible: insight at scale 

The foundation in place for North America Commercial Risk is just the beginning. As additional business units and regions come onboard, Aon has a goal of supporting roughly 400 million documents across the enterprise.

Using Docusign Agreement Manager colleagues will be able to work with AI that’s trained to handle documents at scale. They’ll be able to quickly locate documents, identify policy effective dates, search carrier information, extract insurance product details, and find other business-specific metadata that previously required manually reviewing hundreds of pages of documentation. 

Aon estimated that extracting even 30 basic attributes across 250 million documents with general-purpose models would have cost at least $12 million. Docusign Agreement Manager’s AI features complement Aon’s broader enterprise AI strategy, automatically processing, extracting, and structuring attributes and delivering richer results at a fraction of the cost.

Rather than simply using AI to read individual documents, Aon is applying structured intelligence across millions of documents, turning decades of insurance knowledge into a valuable business asset.

Looking further ahead, Aon and Docusign see an even bigger opportunity. Imagine a colleague asking a plain-language question about a client’s documents and getting an answer in seconds. Imagine a client checking where their program stands at a glance, rather than sending an email to ask. Imagine AI that flags a gap in limits or a missing document before it becomes a problem, and guidance that adapts to each client and each stage of the work.

Onboarding, placement, renewals, certificates, endorsements, claims, invoicing: every insurance workflow at Aon runs on documents. With a connected document foundation, each improvement can scale across all of them.

“This partnership opens up an exciting opportunity,” said Mark Ross, COO, Commercial Risk Service, Aon. “Combining our new approach to document management with disciplined business processes and AI will help turn unstructured data into usable, structured data, reducing friction for colleagues and creating a faster, more connected experience for clients.”

Creating value across the business

Already, the new foundation is making an impact for clients and colleagues alike. With more visibility, Aon can reduce the risk of compliance errors for documents through the platform.

When fully implemented, Aon estimates that they can reduce legacy technology costs, while helping 5,000+ colleagues save between 20 and 40 hours of manual document-related work–a total of 100,000 colleague hours saved for the company each year.

As colleagues spend less time searching for documents, chasing versions, and coordinating approvals, they gain more time to work with clients. Aon also opens new doors for data-driven strategies based on its wealth of historic insights. They can understand total risk across a client’s portfolio, negotiate better insurance coverage, and do it all faster than ever before. For clients, that means faster answers, fewer back-and-forth emails, and more confidence that every document is accurate and complete.

Building a partnership for long-term transformation

Looking back, Aon’s team believes the success of the initiative depended as much on partnership as technology.

Rather than looking at the proof of concept as a rehearsal, Aon and Docusign worked on real insurance use cases to validate requirements and establish a roadmap for long-term transformation. Executives on both sides shared a vision and empowered cross-functional teams to make strategic decisions.

“We highly value our strategic partnership with Docusign, where our teams have worked together to design a smart document repository for the future, powered by LLMs and purpose-built for the needs of a highly regulated industry like insurance,” said  Sudipto Dasgupta, Global Head of Data, AI Platform and Enterprise Architecture, Aon.

As Aon expands the platform across additional business units and global regions, the project demonstrates that successful enterprise technology enhancements begin with a strategic business initiative and grow through long-term partnership.