Jake - Your smart insurance assistant

Main

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Jake - Your smart insurance assistant

Inspiration

Filing an insurance claim shouldn't feel like a second disaster. Yet today, the only path forward is wading through dense forms, gathering documents, and navigating bureaucratic back-and-forth, all while you're already stressed from whatever went wrong.

We wanted to change that. The idea was simple: what if your insurance agent was always available, instantly understood your situation, and handled all the paperwork for you? That frustration with the status quo is what sparked Jake.

What it does

Jake is a conversational AI agent that turns a stressful claims process into a quick chat. You describe your situation and upload a photo, Jake uses computer vision to analyze the damage, cross-references it with weather data to validate your claim, and checks for image fraud. It then hands you a fully prepared claim form, ready to submit. No digging through paperwork, no guesswork.

How we built it

Jake is built on a Python/FastAPI backend powering the core AI pipeline. We used Claude's vision capabilities to analyze damage from uploaded photos, layered with OpenCV and Pillow for image integrity checks and EXIF metadata extraction. Weather data is pulled in to cross-validate claims against real conditions at the time and place of the incident.

Sessions and file storage are handled through AWS S3, keeping the experience stateless and scalable. The frontend is a clean HTML/CSS/JS interface designed to feel like a natural conversation. Everything is wired together through a claim orchestration layer that takes the raw chat + photo input and produces a completed, ready-to-submit form.

Challenges we ran into

One of the first walls we hit was the sheer variety of insurance claim formats. For example, a home damage claim looks nothing like a car accident claim: different fields, different evidence requirements, different legal standards. Trying to build one agent that handles all of them generically would have meant sacrificing depth for breadth.

We quickly realized that car accident claims are actually highly standardized across the EU, thanks to the European Accident Statement (EAS): a uniform form used in all member states. That gave us a solid, well-defined target to build around, and let us focus on doing one thing really well at first, rather than everything poorly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built an end-to-end pipeline that takes a photo and a conversation and produces a properly filled European Accident Statement, the same form used across all EU member states. Getting that right, with fraud checks and weather validation baked in, is something we're genuinely proud of. It's a real reduction in the time and stress people face at one of the worst moments of their day.

What we learned

We were surprised by how underserved this space is. Despite how universal and stressful the claims experience is, there's almost no AI tooling built specifically around it. That gap is a real opportunity, and a signal that there's genuine demand waiting to be met.

People don't need another chatbot. They need a knowledgeable companion that guides them through an unfamiliar process when they're flustered and time-pressured. Building Jake showed us just how much value a focused, well-scoped AI agent can deliver in a space that incumbents have left untouched.

What's next for Jake - Your smart insurance assistant

The foundation is solid, now it's about expanding. We want to refine the conversation interface to make it even more intuitive, and broaden Jake's coverage beyond car accidents to handle home, travel, and other common insurance types. We also plan to extend support beyond the Netherlands, adapting to the claim formats and regulations of other EU countries. The standardization already in place across Europe gives us a strong base to build on.