(Jodie Wallis, Global Chief Analytics Officer, Manulife. Source: Manulife.)
Manulife’s (Toronto) experimentation with artificial intelligence (AI) has paralleled a digital transformation effort ongoing since 2017. However, the technology was introduced roughly a year in advance of that massive initiative. Today, the Global life insurance company is putting AI in a starring role in its transformation roadmaps for the next two years, according to Jodie Wallis, Global Chief Analytics Officer, Manulife. According to Wallis, AI is no longer a separate roadmap within the broader digital transformation, but rather an integrated component of digital strategy, with clear milestones for implementation.
[Editor’s Note: See our related interview with Karen Leggett on Manulife’s ongoing digital transformation by clicking here.]
“In the refresh of our digital transformation roadmaps, we’re making sure that AI is embedded in every initiative where it makes sense,” Wallis says. “Rather than have a separate AI roadmap for AI, our teams have literally gone through every line in the digital customer leadership roadmap and embedded how AI will play a role.”
The work is well underway, Wallis stresses. Last week, Manulife announced that it had rolled out GenAI capabilities to its entire workforce and that currently over 75 percent of its global workforce is engaged with GenAI through learning, immersive experiences and tools, including ChatMFC, the company’s proprietary GenAI assistant introduced in 2024.
Manulife as Industry Leader in AI
Karen Leggett, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Manulife.
On the basis of its introduction of AI in 2016 and its sustained investment in the technology since then, Manulife has earned a leadership position in AI, according to Karen Leggett, the company’s Global Chief Marketing Officer. “I think AI—and particularly the accelerant of Gen AI—is the most transformative technology that any of us will have seen in our career, during our lifetime,” she comments. “I think the Internet will pale by comparison to AI’s ability to transform the way we work, not just technologically—the union of human and AI is more powerful than AI on its own.”
Leggett’s case for Manulife-as-industry leader in AI is bolstered by a leading consulting firm recently placing the company as number 1 globally among insurance companies implementing AI, and in first place with regard to use case deployment. Wallis reports that Manulife has:
- 108 traditional AI models in production
- 36 Gen AI models live
- 70 new models rolling out by year-end
- 400 vetted AI ideas submitted by employees and data scientists
The company’s AI applications range from cost savings and revenue generation to fraud detection and productivity enhancement, Wallis relates.
Manulife’s leadership in AI is not just about technical deployment, but about transforming internal processes, Wallis relates. “We’re looking at it not just from a cost savings perspective, but also a revenue generation perspective and for cost avoidance—in the sense of using AI to detect fraud in many of our businesses—and also as a productivity tool,” she says.
Through experimenting with GenAI during the last few years, Manulife has learned that projects involving the technology can no longer be six- or nine-month affairs. “We’ve learned that we have to shorten our entire development process down to a matter of weeks to keep pace with change,” Wallace says. “The term we use is, ‘innovate locally and scale globally.’”
While many companies might look at GenAI primarily as a fairly isolated tool for cost-reduction, Manulife also sees it as a driver of business growth, as well as an enabler of superior customer and advisor experiences. For that reason, in addition to more targeted deployments, the technology has been “democratized” by being rolled out to all 38,000 Manulife employees and contractors by making tools accessible, encouraging experimentation and embedding it in processes across the enterprise.
Fostering Employee Interest and Competence in GenAI
Leggett sees that democratization as an essential factor in the company’s AI and GenAI leadership: “We believe that by harnessing and really embedding AI as part of our DNA and how we do business as an organization, it becomes part of our culture—and that’s really hard to replicate,” she says.
Manulife hasn’t sat back and simply expected this to happen. Wallis notes that part of the firm’s leadership has been the development of a suite of engagement programs for employees to make the most of AI tools. “There are formal learning programs, there is small-group coaching, there are workshops for specific businesses and functions to help them adapt,” she elaborates. “They can build their own prompts for the types of work they do, there are practice communities, and we’ve even started some executive education.”
Leggett adds that there are less formal “prompt-a-thons” held on Friday afternoons. “People can tap into all of the different types of learning that we have,” she says. “That’s a great opportunity for people to actually use that dedicated time to continue to augment their skills and use it differently.”
These various initiatives have led to significant GenAI adoption including 15,000 unique users monthly engaging with AI tools, 46 queries per month on average, and high adoption across Canada and Asia, including the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam.
“Our employees feel they’re being enabled,” Leggett says. “They’re getting conversant and comfortable with the technology.”
This high level of engagement not only helps to foster the use of AI across the enterprise, but it is also helping retention. “We have very low turnover in our data scientists,” Leggett notes. “Many people may believe that an insurance company might be a boring place to work, but it really isn’t.”
Manulife’s investment in AI, in both budget and focus, is of a piece with the company’s entire digital transformation, which Leggett characterizes as making the right inroads and the right—and very astute, smart, and pragmatic investments.
Culture as Market Differentiator
“We’re continuing to improve the customer experience because we’re putting the customer at the heart of what we’re doing, which is why we’re not just focusing on cost takeout,” Leggett says. In addition to using technology to increase speed and efficiency—including digital claims and new business submission or service requests—Manulife is using AI to drive personalization.
“We’re making the same improvements for our advisors,” Leggett stresses. “We’re giving them those tools to help drive revenue generation and growth. We believe we can grow faster and we can grow with greater quality with the application of these tool sets like AI.”
In addition to carving out a leadership in the technology, AI is simply setting Manulife up for success, Leggett insists. “It will create differentiation by embedding it in our culture as our way of doing business—and that’s not an easy thing for most organizations to do,” she says.
“Everything else can be replicated, but culture is difficult to replicate,” Leggett concludes. “By making this available to all our colleagues and having everyone pull in the same direction it will set us apart.”
Manulife Rolls Out GenAI Capabilities to 100 Percent of Its Workforce