Social Security Administration (SSA) – Insight Decision-Quality Support System

Overview

The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) has developed and deployed the Insight software suite to support decision-quality review in disability adjudication at the hearings and appeals levels. Insight is the best-documented SSA AI subsystem in the retained source base and is therefore treated here as a narrower case than the agency's broader disability-AI portfolio.

Insight was devised by SSA attorney Kurt Glaze and developed within SSA's Office of Appellate Operations (OAO). The tool applies natural language processing to written hearing decisions, extracts information about findings and rationale, and combines that with structured case information from workload systems. Using this combined picture, Insight applies rule-based and probabilistic machine-learning methods to identify potential quality issues in adjudicative decisions across roughly 30 issue areas. In other words, it is designed to read draft or completed decisions as text and help surface patterns or omissions that matter for internal quality review.

The system is explicitly assistive rather than determinative. It does not decide eligibility, order outcomes, or prescribe remedies. Instead, it flags possible quality issues for adjudicators and reviewers, who remain responsible for evaluating the case record and making any resulting determination. Insight was fully deployed to adjudicative staff at the appeals level by late 2017 and at the hearings level by late 2018. That deployment history matters because it shows the system moved beyond a small experiment and into routine use inside a major federal benefits-adjudication environment.

The retained sources associate Insight with improvements in work quality, remediation of quality issues during drafting, recognition of quality issues on appeal, and more efficient case processing. However, those performance statements come from internal studies described in secondary technical and policy sources rather than from a full public operational evaluation released by SSA itself. The case therefore rests on strong documentation of the tool's existence, purpose, and organisational adoption, but only more limited public evidence on its measurable downstream effects.

The broader SSA disability-adjudication environment is relevant context. The agency handles millions of disability claims and faces persistent backlog, staffing, and evidence-processing challenges. Decisions are legally consequential and often depend on large volumes of structured and unstructured evidence. Those pressures help explain why assistive AI tools such as Insight emerged. But other SSA tools, including IMAGEN and QDD, are no longer bundled into this record because they have different purposes, maturity levels, and evidence depth.

Insight operates within a human-in-the-loop oversight framework. Final benefit decisions remain with human adjudicators, and the main documented risks concern automation bias, transparency, explainability, and the possibility that a quality-support tool could still shape outcomes in a rights-impacting domain if staff over-rely on it. Even though Insight is framed as quality assurance rather than direct adjudication, a tool that systematically influences how reviewers identify deficiencies can still affect claimant experience, remand patterns, and the consistency of disability decision-making across the agency.

That is why the decision criticality for the case remains high. The software does not itself award or deny benefits, but it operates close to the core of a rights-affecting adjudication process. Public documentation is also limited relative to the significance of that setting: external observers still lack full visibility into evaluation design, production monitoring, subgroup effects, and contestability mechanisms specific to the tool. Insight is therefore best understood as a mature and real SSA assistive-AI deployment, but one embedded in a domain where even support tools require careful scrutiny.

Classification

Programme Details

Insight is an SSA decision-quality support system used within the disability adjudication workflow at the hearings and appeals levels. It assists review of SSDI and SSI disability decisions by flagging possible quality issues in written adjudicative decisions.

Implementation Details

Risk & Oversight

Deployment & Outcomes

Sources

1. SRC-002-USA-003 Glaze, K., Ho, D.E., Ray, G.K. and Tsang, C. (2024). Artificial Intelligence for Adjudication: The Social Security Administration and AI Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford Digital Government Hub. Available at: https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/SSA.pdf (Accessed: 31 October 2025).
   https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/SSA.pdf
2. SRC-001-USA-003 National Academy of Social Insurance (2025). Phase One Report: Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technology, and Disability Benefits. Washington, DC: NASI. Available at: https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Phase-One-Report-Task-Force-on-Artificial-Intelligence-Emerging-Technology-and-Disability-Benefits.pdf (Accessed: 31 October 2025).
   https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Phase-One-Report-Task-Force-on-Artificial-Intelligence-Emerging-Technology-and-Disability-Benefits.pdf
3. SRC-003-USA-003 The White House (2023). Executive Order 14110 -- Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ (Accessed: 31 October 2025).
   https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-24283/safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence