Discovery and Scoping

The Harborline brief sets the goal and the rules. The insurer wants claims routed within hours, and its AI governance program expects oversight proportional to the risk of harm to policyholders. What the brief leaves open is how routing really works today, which facts in a claim drive it, what compliance needs to see, and how far the first deployment should reach. Finding those answers is the work of discovery.

In Anthropic’s FDE loop, discovery shows up in the customer conversation roleplay that some loops include, and in the opening minutes of the technical screen and the final panel. In an insurance case, interviewers watch for whether the candidate brings the compliance function into the conversation early.

The first conversations set the tone for everything that follows.

Starting with claims and compliance together

A common instinct is to begin with claims operations, build something promising, and show it to compliance at the end. At Harborline, that order would cost weeks. The compliance function decides how much documentation, human oversight, and monitoring the system needs under the insurer’s AI governance program, and those decisions shape the design itself.

Bringing compliance in early also changes the tone of the engagement. The chief compliance officer becomes a partner who helps define what “safe enough to pilot” means, instead of a reviewer who sees the system for the first time when it is nearly finished. And the claims team learns from the start which controls are coming, so they plan for ...