Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international insurance company headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and has a strong presence in Canada, Asia and the United States. As of the first quarter of 2025, Manulife reported $1.8 billion in core revenue and $2.140 million in core revenue. The company manages more than $1.3 trillion in assets and employs more than 38,000 people worldwide, backed by a vast network of agents.
Manulife is investing heavily in AI as part of its digital transformation strategy. By mid-2025, the company had deployed over 35 generation AI use cases across its global business, with plans to expand further by the end of the year. Digital features, including AI improvements, will deliver triple returns on investment over five years, and hopefully bring in more than $600 million in return on investment from the expected global digital initiative in 2024.
In this article, we will explore two use cases for AI in Manulife.
- Democratize AI to promote productivity in the workforce: Streamline empowerment workflows for employees, drive innovation and unlock measurable productivity gains across global operations with Genai-driven virtual assistant tools.
- Integrate enterprise knowledge to increase productivity: Use machine learning to integrate systems, provide faster answers and increase productivity.
Democratize AI to promote productivity in the workforce
According to a press release issued by Manulife, the company has recognized the need to enhance AI capabilities worldwide and globally to fully realize the benefits of digital transformation. The company's goal was to increase efficiency, promote innovation and support strategic growth by integrating AI into all aspects of its operations.
To achieve this, Manulife has deployed Genai's capabilities, including its own assistant, ChatMFC, to 100% of its workforce. The company has also invested in robust cloud-based data and AI platforms and built a dedicated team of nearly 200 data scientists and machine learning engineers to expand and support AI adoption.
Under the AI democratization and scaling initiative, the company has deployed more than 43 Genai use cases in production in Canada, the US and Asia, with over 70 additional use cases prioritizing the rollout by the end of 2025.
Here's a quick overview of how the Genai rollout in Manulife works:
- Gen AI is integrated into daily workflows and accessible to all employees through a unified platform.
- Employees interact with AI assistants such as CHATMFC on information search, task automation, and personalized recommendations.
- The platform leverages a combination of machine learning algorithms such as natural language processing, large-scale language models, and predictive analytics to understand queries, automate processes, and generate insights.
- Usage data and feedback are collected continuously to improve AI models, improve relevance, and expand functionality.
Manulife has not yet released detailed case-specific financial results on the Genai rollout, but public disclosures show significant early impact. The company has achieved more than $600 million in profits from its digital initiative in 2024, and expects a triple return on investment from its digital and AI programs over the five years from 2027 to 2027.
In an exclusive interview with CDO Magazine, global chief analytics director at Manulife, he shared that the generator AI feature generated $4.7 million in profits for the company. With over 35 Genai use cases already in production and over 75% of the global workforce actively involved in AI tools, these initiatives are driving Manulife's measurable productivity improvements and operational efficiency.
Integrate enterprise knowledge to increase productivity
Many large companies struggle with fragmented knowledge systems, making it difficult for employees to quickly find relevant information. One case study at VU University in Amsterdam identified over 100 individual information artifacts for a single purchase approval process. This shows how fragmentation can overwhelm the user and interfere with efficient access to the documents they need.
Fragmented knowledge systems lead to reduced productivity, inefficient services, siloed information, and employee dissatisfaction. Companies must seek solutions that unify their knowledge ecosystem, improve search relevance, enable self-service, and ultimately improve operational efficiency and customer outcomes.
According to a case study published by Coveo, Manulife faced similar challenges as more than 38,000 employees need to quickly access critical information across multiple systems. The company has realized that strengthening the workforce with better knowledge discoveries is:
- Increase productivity by minimizing the time spent searching for information
- Improve employee experience and even customer service.
- Supports a broader range of digital transformation and AI adoption strategies.
To meet these needs, Manulife has partnered with Coveo to use an associated platform powered by AI.
Coveo is a software development company that builds enterprise search software. Its associated platform is an AI-powered platform designed for enterprise search and knowledge management.
According to case studies, Manulife aimed to enable intranets to support employees and find role-specific task-specific information, not just general company information and news. In other words, the company needed content from multiple systems to be accessible within the intranet.
This collaboration aims to:
- Integrate search functions,
- Take advantage of AI-driven recommendations
- Improve employee proficiency
Here's a brief overview of how Coveo-related platforms work
- Coveo integrates and indexes content from multiple sources, including connector-based intranets, knowledge bases, and cloud apps.
- When users search, the platform processes the queries through a pipeline that applies business rules and machine learning models.
- It uses a variety of machine learning algorithms, including auto-related tuning, query suggestions, and event recommendations, to rank and personalize results.
- The results are taken from a unified index and reordered for maximum relevance.
- User interactions generate analytics that feed back into AI models to continuously improve search accuracy and personalization.
The case studies directly argue for Manulif's next improvement:
- Increased productivity: 70% pioneering AI-driven proposals and reduce the time spent searching for information.
- Search-related improvements: Employees report that “the correct answer is automatically there,” reflecting high levels of satisfaction and recruitment.
Enhanced decision-making: Coveo argues that analytics help Manulife actively deal with content gaps and optimize the user experience.
