A model that lets the insurer build once, deploy widely and adapt to local realities.
The industry-wide opportunity with AI lies not only in imagining what is possible, but in turning ambition into practical, scalable change. The challenge is closing the distance between a promising proof of concept and something that survives contact with reality. Closing that distance won Manulife Asia this year’s award for Best Overall AI
Manulife’s approach is built on strategic investments, localized delivery and a strong culture of knowledge sharing to scale AI across the organization. The company has invested in enterprise AI platforms, responsible AI governance, reusable tools and role-based capabilities, while keeping ideation and delivery close to the end user. This gives local teams ownership to shape solutions around their own customers, regulatory, linguistic and distribution realities, while successful use cases are shared, adapted and re-used across markets. It explains how the group has moved over 129 generative AI use cases into production globally, with 138 more in development.
The Asian deployments show what that discipline can achieve in the form of measurable results. In Hong Kong, AI SalesPro supports more than 11,000 agents with real-time product information, customer and next-best-action prompts, reducing preparation from as much as 14 days to a single day. Also in Hong Kong, the Manulife AI Assistant is built to handle mixed Cantonese, English, and Mandarin conversation, resolving 10% of customer queries without human intervention.
And Vietnam’s M-Smart, an AI assistant, and Indonesia’s MAIN, an AI-enabled digital sales platform apply similar logic to different distribution economics.
The same focus on practical impact is visible beyond distribution and customer service.
In investment management, an AI research assistant has cut document analysis time by 70 to 80% while preserving human review.
This progress has been deliberate, supported by peer-to-peer and role-based learning, prompt-a-thons, agentic AI labs, an AI Champions Network spanning eight business functions globally and most of Manulife’s Asia markets, and a global community of practice of more than 12,000 colleagues. The result is a workforce treating AI as a baseline capability, not a technology rollout.
Importantly, governance has kept pace. Six Responsible AI principles are published openly, with lifecycle controls shaped by risk, legal, compliance and privacy teams. This discipline is reflected in Manulife’s external AI ecosystem, including its expanded five-year partnership with Microsoft to strengthen enterprise AI governance and innovation, and its strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong to accelerate responsible AI innovation and deployment. The insurer has also joined the Hong Kong Insurance Authority (HKIA)’s AI Cohort Programme and established a regional AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.
