The Claims Assistant That Did Not Need a Swarm

Teaching composite — not a claim about a named organisation or measured outcome. A claims organisation wants an assistant to prepare a case summary from policy documents, adjuster notes and photographs before a human handler decides the next step. The proposal has a planner, five specialist agents, an autonomous web researcher, a reviewer and a supervisor. It looks sophisticated, but no one can say which agent owns a wrong recommendation, which tools may access claimant material, or how a failed run resumes.

The claims officer reframes the design. The first release needs to retrieve approved internal evidence, extract a fixed summary, identify missing evidence and prepare—not make—the handler's recommendation. A single retrieval-grounded agent with a structured output may meet that need. A planner, specialist workers or browser automation may be added later only if representative evaluation shows a specific limitation that the simpler system cannot meet.

The team records the deterministic controls: case access, permitted sources, validation, the action boundary and a human approval before any customer communication. It defines an evaluation set including ordinary claims, conflicting notes, missing documents and requests outside the assistant's authority. The result is not less ambitious; it is a design the business can test, explain and safely improve.