Manulife and Microsoft renewed and expanded their AI partnership, with a five-year agreement. Manulife will adopt Microsoft's Frontier Suite and Microsoft Agent 365, and deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Aaron Minkovich, chief technology officer at Manulife, shared insights around the company's AI strategy and what the return on investment for this partnership looks like.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
What led to the expanded, five-year agreement?
Microsoft has been a longstanding strategic technology partner for Manulife, and this
As part of the partnership, Manulife has adopted Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Suite capabilities to help enable innovation at scale through secure cloud and AI solutions. This includes expanding Microsoft 365 Copilot access to more than 30,000 employees and deploying Microsoft Agent 365, a platform designed to help organizations govern, monitor and secure AI agents at enterprise scale.
We believe
A five-year commitment provides the stability needed to build AI capabilities at enterprise scale. Adopting the Microsoft Frontier Suite gives us a trusted foundation to advance AI across our global operations with confidence. It also provides the scale, security and intelligence we need to accelerate innovation and embed AI responsibly throughout the business. As organizations increasingly rely on AI, responsible AI use is paramount, and Manulife is proud to be a responsible AI steward.
What is Manulife's strategic mission related to AI?
We are focused on embedding AI into core business processes across the company to create measurable value for customers, advisors, employees and shareholders.
We are prioritizing practical applications that improve productivity, efficiency and customer experiences. For example, many of our developers have adopted assisted and autonomous AI capabilities, increasing productivity by approximately 30% while allowing us to reinvest capacity into business growth and new customer-facing capabilities.
GitHub Copilot has helped lay a strong foundation for the next phase of our AI journey by advancing our autonomous development capabilities and accelerating the design, build and release of new solutions. This includes business-facing applications such as Manulife's mortgage renewal platform, which was rebuilt in a matter of weeks.
At every stage, our Responsible AI Principles guide how we design, build and deploy AI solutions.
What will the process be to expand AI to employees?
The rollout will be supported by training, education and adoption programs, alongside
Copilot helps employees access information more quickly, summarize content, analyze data and automate routine tasks. By reducing administrative work, employees can spend more time on strategic, creative and customer-focused activities.
Today, employees use Copilot to prepare for meetings, summarize documents, draft communications and uncover insights across large volumes of information. We're also seeing increasing adoption of AI capabilities within familiar tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SharePoint.
What's the ROI for a partnership like this?
We are already seeing measurable business value from our AI investments.
More than 80% of Manulife developers actively use GitHub Copilot, and developers have increased productivity by approximately 30%. In another example, AI has eliminated more than 400,000 manual intake and indexing tasks within our U.S. claims and servicing operations.
More broadly, AI is creating measurable value across multiple areas of the business, including operations, technology, underwriting and distribution. As we reported publicly, Manulife generated approximately about $213 million (CA $300 million) in enterprise AI value by the end of 2025. Looking ahead, we expect to generate about $717 million (CA $1 billion) in enterprise AI value by 2027.
What does responsible innovation mean to Manulife?
We are scaling AI quickly, but always within a strong framework of Responsible AI Principles and governance that allows us to innovate safely and responsibly.
We have publicly published Responsible AI Principles that guide how we design, build and deploy AI across the company. Our approach is built on four pillars: Principles and Governance, AI Risk Management, Responsible Solution Development, and AI Assurance.
We also have frameworks, processes, tools and oversight mechanisms in place to help ensure AI systems are developed, deployed and used in ways that align with our values, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations.
What are future use cases for this technology and what's ahead?
We have identified several transformational areas where we expect AI to create value at scale, including AI assistants, underwriting, distribution, AI for technology teams, advice and operational automation.
In underwriting, for example, AI tools in North America can now generate preliminary assessments in less than 15 minutes, helping customers receive decisions faster.
Looking ahead, we expect AI to help employees access information and complete work more efficiently, while enabling new ways to serve customers and advisors. We are also exploring the potential of agentic AI to support increasingly complex workflows and business processes.
As we scale adoption, our focus will remain on practical applications that create measurable business value, supported by strong governance, human oversight and a commitment to responsible AI.
Anything else you'd like to share?
This partnership is about accelerating innovation while maintaining the trust, security and accountability that our customers, employees and stakeholders expect. AI is becoming an increasingly important capability across our business, and this agreement helps provide the foundation we need to scale AI responsibly across the organization and deliver meaningful benefits for customers, advisors and employees.
Our focus remains on creating long-term value for customers, employees, advisors and shareholders, while ensuring responsible AI, human oversight and customer trust remain at the center of everything we do.
