After spending $1 billion from 2023 to 2025 to upgrade its digital capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI), Manulife has so far rolled out 35 generative AI use cases in Canada, the U.S. and Asia that are helping serve customers and employees.
In Canada, Manulife has used AI to automate receipt digitization for group benefits claims. The system can read non-standard documents, understand the context, extract relevant information and start the right claims process, said Jodie Wallis, global chief analytics officer with Manulife, in an interview.
The insurer, which said in a release it plans to deploy an additional 70 applications by the end of 2025, reaped $600 million of benefits from AI in 2024. It expects to generate a threefold return on investment through 2027, according to its fourth quarter report.
Wallis noted how the technology has advanced in a short time. Just four years ago, the AI was still undergoing supervised training, where humans codified hundreds of thousands of receipts so the system could learn what to look for.
“We don’t have to train anymore,” Wallis said. “AI in the generative sense is able to anticipate what the various components of the receipt might be, … validate them and move them through the process.”
Furthermore, three-quarters of the insurer’s global workforce is engaged with generative AI through learning and immersion in tools, including ChatMFC, a generative AI assistant Manulife introduced last year.
ChatMFC is available to all Manulife employees and full-time contractors globally, Wallis said.
Part of the insurer’s AI strategy is to “innovate locally, scale globally,” where the tool development occurs locally in multiple places before it’s deployed in other markets, Wallis said. “Each of the geographies and each of the businesses brings their own lens to it.”
For instance, the U.S. is mostly a unilingual market while Asian contexts are multilingual, Wallis said. Hence, the AI developed in Asia can distinguish between languages, translate them and provide a response in the appropriate language.
A generative AI tool in Singapore and Japan helps insurance agents create personalized engagement with clients based on needs, preferences, demographic data and transaction histories.
Agents in Singapore and Japan could have a portfolio of more than 200 customers, so it’s difficult to engage with all of them personally several times a year, Wallis said. The AI helps agents use relevant information to craft an opener script for an email or a text message.
Manulife is also developing several AI applications, such as a coaching tool that lets agents interactively practise client conversations, which it plans to bring to Canada.