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Manulife Financial Corporation (Toronto) has selected Akka (San Francisco) to support development of its enterprise agentic artificial intelligence platform. Akka will provide runtime infrastructure intended to support security, reliability and performance as Manulife expands use of AI across business workflows.
Jodie Wallis, Global Chief AI Officer, Manulife.
“Our insurance and investment businesses are built on trust, and that same principle guides our approach to AI,” says Jodie Wallis, Global Chief AI Officer, Manulife Financial Corporation. “As we explore technologies that can help us scale reliable, compliant and resilient AI systems, solutions like Akka illustrate how enterprises can build and operate agentic systems with the speed, predictability and governance required in highly regulated environments.”
Manulife’s enterprise AI platform, currently in beta testing, is designed to provide a development environment for AI agents that assist with decision support and task automation. The platform incorporates governance controls intended to support compliance and responsible AI practices.
Tyler Jewell, CEO, Akka.
“Partnering with a leader like Manulife is an honor for us,” says Tyler Jewell, CEO, Akka. “The Manulife team demonstrates the rare understanding of what it really takes to deliver agentic AI on a global scale. Without consistent engineering practices that address a complex and continually changing set of environment factors, AI systems, which are inherently random, will not be trusted to deliver business outcomes.”
Manulife says the platform will support development of AI-enabled applications while maintaining governance frameworks aligned with the company’s Responsible AI principles.
AI-Powered Organization
Shamus Weiland, Global CIO, Manulife Financial Corporation.
“Manulife is embedding AI across nearly every part of our business while equipping our colleagues with the capabilities to design, operate and scale solutions,” says Shamus Weiland, Global Chief Information Officer, Manulife Financial Corporation. “Akka provides a secure, scalable software foundation to support high volumes of business applications to accelerate meaningful value creation across our franchise. This partnership is rooted in our Responsible AI Principles, with a strong focus on governance, human oversight, and safety, as we advance toward becoming an AI-powered organization.”
In December 2025, Manulife also announced a partnership with Adaptive ML to provide reinforcement-learning tools for model optimization within the platform.
Manulife has invested in artificial intelligence capabilities since 2016 and was ranked first among life insurers in the inaugural Evident AI Index for Insurance in 2025. The company expects AI initiatives to generate more than $1 billion in enterprise value by 2027, with a portion attributed to operational efficiency gains.