From a career spanning Australia, Japan, the US and Canada to a mandate to make Manulife an AI-powered organization, Sarah Chapman (pictured) is steering one of the sector’s most ambitious digital overhauls. For brokers, underwriters and operations leaders across insurance, her approach offers a clear lesson: technology is the easy part.
Sarah Chapman did not begin her career in insurance, and that, she suggests, is precisely the point.
She started in Australia, then moved through Japan and wider Asia before heading to Boston and, ultimately, Canada. Along the way, her work consistently revolved around transformation and innovation, but in very different guises: sustainability, customer experience, marketing, brand and corporate affairs.
At Hitachi, for example, Chapman spent years examining how existing product sets could be reframed and retooled to advance sustainability agendas and open up new customer segments, “through more of a sustainability, social issues, social innovation lens”. That same instinct, to ask how legacy products and processes might be reimagined for new expectations, now underpins her mission at Manulife.
Today, she holds a dual remit at the global insurance firm: Global Head of Digital Transformation and Customer Centricity and Chief Marketing Officer (most recently for wealth and asset management and, as of three weeks before the interview, for the Canadian insurance division). In the context of Manulife’s digital agenda, it is the global digital and customer role that defines her mandate.
Chapman draws a sharp line between “putting old processes online” and genuine transformation. For Manulife, the latter has meant rethinking the way insurance and wealth solutions are delivered, not simply transferring paper forms to a screen.
The impact is already measurable. Around seven in 10 customer service requests are now completed fully online, end to end, without a call centre or manual intervention. That statistic captures the ambition: faster, simpler, more transparent journeys with fewer handoffs.
For brokers and advisers, the same philosophy manifests as enablement. The aim, Chapman says, is to provide “clearer information, faster turnaround, and the tools that support advice rather than add friction to their day”. For underwriters, digital tools are configured to “augment expertise”, automating straightforward cases so specialists can concentrate on complex risk and judgment.
The cultural shift is being matched by hard numbers. Across 2023–2025, Manulife has exceeded CAD $1.5bn in cumulative digital benefits, spanning growth and cost take-out. The company frames this under a “digital customer leadership ambition”: to be the number one choice for customers.
Pressed to identify flagship initiatives that have truly “moved the needle”, Chapman chooses to spotlight a single internal platform: VOICE (Valuable Opportunities to Improve Customer Experience).
Described as an enterprise system for capturing, analyzing and democratizing customer feedback, VOICE ingests digital behaviour signals, call-centre transcripts, net promoter scores, complaints and other inputs into a single “intuitive, self-serve analytics hub” for staff.
The aim is nothing less than to change how the organization understands customer experience, call drivers, pain points, emerging issues and, crucially, how fast it can act. Generative AI is embedded to summarise large volumes of data, detect new themes and surface friction points in real time.
The result, Chapman notes, has been “faster action for our teams, fewer repeat calls for our customers, and, ultimately, deeper visibility into what our customers are actually experiencing across the markets”. For colleagues, it has “revolutionized the experience” of working with customer insight; for the firm, it accelerates progress towards that “number one choice for customers” ambition.
VOICE sits alongside a wider portfolio of AI-driven tools. In the US, John Hancock’s (the US insurance division of Manulife) Quick Quote has “completely transformed our underwriting process” for complex cases that traditionally took extended time to assess. In Canada, Manulife has introduced a redesigned electronic application and an enhanced version of its proprietary AI underwriting engine, MAUDE (Manulife Automated Underwriting Decision Engine).The group has also developed sales enablement capabilities significant enough to be showcased at its investor day, explaining to the market how digital is enabling distribution.
VOICE is built in-house, on top of infrastructure such as Power BI, but Chapman is clear that Manulife operates a hybrid model: every major tool involves a conscious conversation about “what are we buying and what are we building? What are we renting?” That mix is dictated by requirements around complexity, scale and, importantly for insurers, personal data and risk tolerance.
In a vast organization with a long queue of ideas, the obvious question is how projects secure funding. Chapman’s answer will resonate with many insurance executives wrestling similar trade-offs.
Decisions, she says, are “anchored in whether a digital initiative is ultimately advancing our ambition to be the number one choice for customers”. That aspiration is translated into three pragmatic tests:
On that third point, Chapman is emphatic. “We can have the greatest ideas in the world, but unless we’re adopting them and changing our ways of working internally, you know that technology is going to sit on a shelf.” For her, adoption is “perhaps maybe the most important one”.
For all the emphasis on AI, data platforms and cloud architecture, Chapman insists the most complex part of the journey has extended beyond technology alone.
“What I’d say proved harder than expected actually wasn’t the technology, but rather the discipline that’s required to simplify the processes and fully embed these new capabilities into day-to-day routines,” she reflects. “You can embed AI on top of an overly complicated process and you’re not actually going to get the full value.”
The real work, she argues, is change management: clarifying decision rights, retiring legacy ways of working and ensuring teams consistently use the tools and insights already available. Technology must be “anchored in real customer problems”, but “it’s got to be paired with that business ownership”. When that combination is in place, she finds, adoption and impact on both culture and process simplification comes faster than expected.
Making digital “stick” has required a wholesale rethink of skills, roles and incentives. Manulife has mounted a substantial capability-building effort, with more than 40,000 colleague interactions across its curated learning pathways. These are designed to build digital fluency and “embed confidence in data and insights at all levels of the organization”.
At the same time, the firm has moved to democratize AI access, rolling out Gen AI capabilities to 100 per cent of employees globally. That ubiquity is deliberate: AI should feel like a normal part of how people work, not a specialist add-on.
Chapman also talks about “transferable capabilities”. In any one role, she notes, an individual might carry out 15 activities every day. AI and digitization might eliminate or accelerate only two or three of those, but the point is to view the entire skillset and ask how people can be redeployed into higher-value tasks.
Finally, Manulife is reshaping how performance is discussed. It is “shifting performance conversations away from activity and outputs towards adoption, impact, customer outcomes”. Digital transformation, in her formulation, is “not just a project that comes and goes, but rather a culture and a mindset”.
Manulife’s footprint spans multiple continents and regulatory regimes. Rather than insisting on uniform, simultaneous roll-outs, Chapman has favoured starting where appetite and conditions are strongest.
“Advice I was given many years ago is go where there is momentum and appetite and attach yourself and really drive, others will come along that journey and join that wave of momentum,” she recalls.
In practice, that has meant selecting markets and businesses that are “ripe and ready for innovation”, especially when dealing with AI. Readiness, in her view, encompasses regulatory factors, jurisdictional issues and potential customer impact, as well as internal enthusiasm.
The ambition is not piecemeal. Manulife seeks to “build once and use across the organization”, exploiting its scale to “import and export across borders and across business lines”. For a global insurer, that ability to replicate proven models while respecting local conditions is fast becoming a competitive differentiator.
If VOICE underscores Manulife’s in-house capabilities, Chapman is careful to stress the importance of external allies. “We cannot do this alone,” she says. Technology and data partners are described as “a critical unlock”.
The best of those partners, in her view, do two things. First, they understand Manulife’s customer ambition and bring “complementary capabilities” that add something the firm could not efficiently build itself. Second, they align with the group’s values.
That values test is most visible in AI. Manulife was “one of the first organizations to stand up what we called our Responsible AI Principles”, she notes, and those principles now sit at the heart of partnership evaluation. The question is whether potential partners share the organization’s approach to “responsible AI, responsible digital transformation”.
Detailed technical scrutiny follows, complementary capabilities, scalability, security but “ultimately, those partnerships come down to alignment on both ambition and principles and values”.
In November 2025, Manulife refreshed its enterprise strategy and, in doing so, made a striking commitment: being an “AI-powered organization” is now a key pillar.
That statement, Chapman says, signals an intent to redesign internal processes and customer experiences “with that sort of AI-powered mindset at its home”. AI is cast as a “massive enabler” of the firm’s customer ambition.
Initially, most use cases have been internally focused, supporting employees and operations. The group is now moving carefully towards customer-facing applications, asking where and when AI can add genuine value without compromising trust or clarity.
Across the piece, though, AI is “embedded and it is a critical enabler and a key pillar of our strategy”. It is not a side experiment.
If there is a single statistic that captures Manulife’s appetite for AI, it is this: more than 70 per cent of its global workforce has engaged directly with AI tools, either through formal learning or via day-to-day systems.
Central among those systems is Chat-MFC, the company’s proprietary GenAI assistant, introduced in 2024 and named for Manulife’s stock ticker. For a business with colleagues “in countries all around the world”, Chapman admits she did not expect such rapid uptake. The level of engagement with Gen AI has been “one of the biggest and most pleasant surprises” of the entire programme.
That engagement is not just about productivity. For many employees, the removal of low-value tasks, re-keying data, chasing documentation, manual reconciliations has improved job satisfaction. Chapman describes it as “a huge driver of employee engagement. They feel far more engaged and excited about coming to work every day.”
Asked about her biggest personal leadership challenge in driving digital change, Chapman consistently returns to human factors rather than systems design.
“You can’t underestimate how hard it is for teams to unlearn deeply embedded ways of working,” she says, particularly in a “large in scale and global and highly regulated” organization. Technology investments will falter if “the incentives and the decision rights and the leadership behaviours don’t change at that same pace”.
If she were starting again, she would “invest early and really deliberately in change management and change leadership”, not just in delivery capability. She would also “simplify the narrative”, be very crisp about what the organization is trying to do and what customer impacts it is targeting because digital can “get very complex very quickly”.
Third, she would “create more space for experimentation and learning”, accepting imperfections and embracing a “fail fast” mindset.
“For me,” she concludes, “if I just step back from all of this, digital transformation is less about the technology and it’s more about trust and clarity and leadership courage. To me, that’s where the real work is.”
Looking ahead three to five years, she expects the combination of generative AI, high quality data and automation to “fundamentally reshape the insurance and wealth and asset management industry”. The technology itself is not entirely new, she notes; what will change the sector is its impact on how work is done end to end, particularly in underwriting and claims, customer experience, and the evolution of employee roles.
For all the focus on data and operating models, Chapman’s off-duty life looks more familiar than futuristic. Away from Manulife, she is the mother of two young daughters, who “keep me busy and up at night, literally and figuratively”. Between hockey, swimming, skating, golf and tennis, she laughs that she is “absolutely and happily a taxi driver. They are my joy,” she says simply.
When she does reclaim some time for herself, it is most often in the kitchen. Cooking is a full “end to end” process she relishes, from shopping to prep to what many regard as the worst part. “I love everything about cooking”. She cooks savoury dishes and desserts alike, “I do it all. I love it all” usually with her “little sous chefs” by her side. The girls, she notes with a smile, eat the food, “they don’t have a choice”.
