Seguros Bolívar empowers 3,000 employees with n8n to become an AI-first insurer

Context

Seguros Bolívar is one of Colombia's leading insurance companies, with over 85 years of history serving individuals, families, and businesses across the country. The company offers a wide range of insurance products focused on protection, wellbeing, and peace of mind. With more than 3,000 employees, Seguros Bolívar operates nationwide and has been a trusted name in the Colombian insurance industry for decades.

In recent years, the company set one of the most ambitious goals in Latin American insurance: becoming an AI-first organization. This vision came directly from senior leadership, who declared that the company needed to transform its processes, simplify operations, and better serve its customers. As Germán Sánchez, VP of Technology, puts it: "Technology doesn't transform organizations on its own. People do, when they have the right tools, support, and processes." To make this happen, Seguros Bolívar needed a tool that could democratize workflow automation across the entire workforce, not just among technical teams.

Challenge

Despite its strong market position, Seguros Bolívar faced significant operational friction caused by manual processes and aging infrastructure. The company's core system has been in service for over 20 years, making any modification through traditional software development costly, rigid, and error-prone. Business rules were deeply embedded in legacy code, and every change required costly and lengthy development cycles.

One of the most critical bottlenecks was the prior authorization process. When a doctor issued an order, the company's clinical review team (nurses and physicians) had to manually review each request, verify policy coverage and exclusions, confirm which healthcare provider should handle the procedure, and finally authorize or deny the request. Each policy has different terms and conditions, meaning coverages, exclusions, and limits vary between clients. Orders came in across inconsistent formats: images, PDFs, and different document types, all requiring manual interpretation.

This administrative burden meant that generating a single prior authorization could take three to four weeks. Behind every delayed authorization was a real person waiting for an answer about their medical care. Meanwhile, highly qualified medical professionals were spending their time on repetitive administrative tasks instead of focusing on strategic, high-value medical decisions. The cost of this manual operation was enormous, both in time and in human capital.

Modifying the core system to solve these problems was not a viable option. "Touching the core and doing traditional software development on top of it is very costly, inflexible, and error-prone." Seguros Bolívar needed a way to build automation around the core system without having to rewrite it.

Solution

Seguros Bolívar adopted n8n as its workflow automation platform in early 2025, making it available to all 3,000 employees. The rollout started with early adopters, followed by a structured training program. The company held in-person and virtual workshops, beginning with foundational AI concepts and progressing to hands-on workflow building in n8n. Within three to six months, n8n achieved full adoption across the organization.

The training strategy was part of a broader AI governance initiative, supported by Lab10, a Latin American technology partner. Senior leadership teams were enabled first and then passed the knowledge down to their respective teams. The goal was self-sufficiency: employees should be able to identify repetitive tasks in their daily work and build their own n8n workflows to solve them.

For the prior authorization use case specifically, the n8n workflow integrated with Gemini AI nodes to interpret incoming medical orders, extract relevant data, apply business rules, and generate authorizations in near real time. The workflow reads the business logic, queries patient and policy information, and executes the full approval chain that previously required manual human intervention. As a result, clinical review teams can focus more on medical judgment and clinical appropriateness rather than spending time on repetitive administrative workloads.

A key point: n8n allowed Seguros Bolívar to build this automation layer outside the legacy core system. n8n workflows connect to internal databases and APIs, read business rules, and process transactions without requiring any changes to the 20-year-old core application. This approach also gave the business much more agility: adding or modifying a business rule in n8n is dramatically faster than going through a traditional development cycle on the core system.

Employees across the company now treat n8n as part of their standard toolkit, alongside tools like email and calendar. The company currently runs over 300 active n8n workflows across various departments, covering both business processes and support functions.

Results

The impact of n8n at Seguros Bolívar has been transformative. The prior authorization process went from three to four weeks to near real time — a reduction that completely changed the experience for both employees and customers. Contractually, policyholders knew that an authorization could take weeks. Now, many authorizations are generated on the spot, creating a radically better service experience.

The operational cost of the authorization process dropped drastically. Doctors and nurses who previously dedicated their time to repetitive administrative review can now focus on tasks that truly require medical expertise.

Beyond the signature prior authorization workflow, n8n has allowed Seguros Bolívar to scale automation across the entire organization. With over 300 workflows running and 3,000 employees enabled, n8n has become a central part of how the company operates. Processes that previously depended on backlogs of manual operational tasks are now managed through automated queues, giving the business greater speed and flexibility.

The integration of AI within n8n workflows has also advanced the company's AI-first vision. Artificial intelligence is not used in isolation but is integrated within end-to-end automation.