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HONG KONG, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Manulife Asia has been named winner of the Best Overall AI Adoption: Life/Health award at the 2026 Asia Consumer Insurance Awards, organized by (Re)Insurance Asia. The award recognizes life and health insurers that have demonstrated broad-based adoption of artificial intelligence across multiple business functions.
The recognition reflects Manulife’s continued progress in becoming an AI-powered organization, with AI increasingly embedded across the value chain in Asia and globally, from customer service and distribution to claims, investment management and colleague productivity.
Across Asia, Manulife’s AI adoption is focused on solving practical business and customer challenges at scale. The company’s approach combines global and regional scale with local ownership and innovation, enabling teams to build once, deploy across markets and tailor solutions to local customer and business needs. This approach is supported by structured governance, cross-functional delivery, role-based training, AI Champions and local activation to help teams move from experimentation to everyday use.
“AI is becoming a core enterprise capability at Manulife, helping us improve how decisions are made, how work gets done and how experiences are delivered for customers, advisors and colleagues,” said Mark Czajkowski, Chief AI Officer, Asia, Manulife. “This recognition reflects the strong momentum our teams across Asia are building as we scale AI responsibly and focus on practical outcomes that make insurance simpler, faster and more intuitive.”
Manulife’s AI initiatives in Asia include AI-powered customer and distribution assistants, claims triage and document processing, underwriting support, investment research tools and enterprise productivity solutions such as Microsoft Copilot and proprietary tools. These capabilities help improve response times, strengthen service consistency, reduce manual work, support advisor productivity and enhance decision-making.
Manulife is scaling AI as a core driver of enterprise value, with the company expecting to deliver more than $1 billion in AI enterprise value generation by 2027, including C$300 million generated in 20251. This builds on approximately C$300 million in cumulative enterprise value delivered by AI as at 31 December 2025. In Asia, this momentum is reflected in strong colleague adoption, with 5.2 million AI prompts recorded in 2025 and 80% of Asia colleagues actively using AI tools as of June 2026.
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1 The expected value from our AI initiatives include realized run-rate expense reductions, top-line revenue uplift from AI-powered workflows, fraud reduction, and growth absorption. |
This latest recognition follows Manulife being ranked the #1 life insurer for AI maturity in the 2026 Evident AI Index for Insurance for the second consecutive year, reinforcing the company’s progress in scaling AI with strong governance, enterprise-wide adoption and measurable business impact.
Manulife’s approach to AI is guided by its Responsible AI Principles and supported by enterprise-wide governance and risk management frameworks. The company takes a human-centered approach to AI, with a focus on transparency, accountability and human oversight.
“As we continue to scale AI across Asia, our focus remains clear: responsible adoption, practical execution and meaningful impact,” added Czajkowski. “This award recognizes the work of teams across our markets who are embedding AI into everyday workflows and using it to deliver better outcomes for customers, distributors, colleagues and the business.”
About Manulife
Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Anchored in our ambition to be the number one choice for customers, we operate as Manulife across Canada and Asia, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States, providing financial advice, insurance and health solutions for individuals, groups and businesses. Through Manulife Wealth & Asset Management, we offer global investment solutions, financial advice, and retirement plan services to individuals, institutions, and retirement plan members worldwide. At the end of 2025, we had more than 37,000 employees, over 106,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving over 37 million customers with operations across 25 markets globally. We trade as ‘MFC’ on the Toronto, New York, and Philippine stock exchanges, and under ‘945’ on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Not all offerings are available in all jurisdictions. For additional information, please visit manulife.com.
Caution regarding forward-looking statements
This document contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the “safe harbour” provisions of Canadian provincial securities laws and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 with respect to Manulife’s use of its digital capabilities and the expected benefits it expects to realize from AI. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include but are not limited to general business and economic conditions; changes in laws and regulations with respect to the use of AI-enabled tools; our ability to execute our digital plans and to deploy future digital use cases; our ability to adapt products and services to the changing market; our ability to attract and retain key employees and our ability to protect our intellectual property and exposure to claims of infringement from others. Additional information about material risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations may be found in our most recent annual and interim reports and elsewhere in our filings with Canadian and U.S. securities regulators.
The forward-looking statements in this document are, unless otherwise indicated, stated as of the date hereof. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
Media Contact
Carl Wong
Head of External Communications, Asia
Manulife
carl_kk_wong@manulifeam.com
