Manulife framed the deal as supporting its strategic priority to become an AI-powered organization. Shamus Weiland, chief technology and operations officer at Manulife, said the partnership underpins the next stage of the insurer's AI transformation.
"Our partnership with Microsoft is a critical enabler of Manulife's continued evolution into a truly AI-driven organization," Weiland said. "Adopting the Microsoft Frontier Suite represents the next phase of that transformation, giving us the trusted foundation to advance AI across our global operations with confidence."
Microsoft is a foundational partner in Manulife's global enterprise AI platform, currently in pilot, which is intended to let Manulife's data scientists and developers build, deploy and manage AI and agentic solutions at scale within a shared governance framework.
Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Foundry provide tools ranging from citizen development capabilities to model fine-tuning and monitoring. Manulife will also use Microsoft Agent 365 as a registry for AI agents across the enterprise, giving it a single interface to observe and manage how those agents operate.
Jodie Wallis, Manulife's global chief AI officer, said governance needs to be embedded into daily operations rather than treated separately.
"As AI becomes more deeply embedded across our business, responsible innovation has to be built into how we operate, not treated as a separate layer of oversight," Wallis said. "For Manulife, that means giving our teams the clarity, controls and confidence to use AI in ways that are secure, transparent and aligned to our Responsible AI Principles."
Manulife's emphasis on AI governance lands as Canadian regulators formalize their own expectations in this area.
The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions published Guideline E-23 on Model Risk Management in September 2025, a principles-based framework that, for the first time, extends beyond deposit-taking institutions to cover all federally regulated insurers and explicitly brings AI and machine learning models into scope alongside traditional actuarial and underwriting models.
The guideline takes effect May 1, 2027, giving insurers roughly a year and a half to build enterprise-wide model inventories and governance structures capable of demonstrating oversight of systems like the AI agents Manulife is now deploying.
A joint OSFI and Financial Consumer Agency of Canada risk report found AI adoption among federally regulated financial institutions climbed from roughly 30% in 2019 to 50% in 2023, with adoption expected to reach 70% by 2026, underscoring how quickly the systems E-23 is meant to govern have spread across the sector.
Manulife pointed to several AI applications already in production, including a sales enablement tool using Foundry models that has scaled from Singapore into multiple markets, John Hancock's Quick Quote underwriting support tool in the US, and generative AI systems supporting more than 110 million customer calls annually across North America, with expansion into Asia underway.
Manulife's push comes as the Evident AI Index for Insurance, an annual benchmark of AI maturity across 30 major North American and European insurers, found Manulife ranked third overall and the top-ranked life insurer for the second consecutive year in its 2026 edition, also naming it the top insurer in Canada and first in the index's Leadership category.
Manulife is not alone among Canadian insurers investing heavily in AI. Intact Financial has reported $200 million in annual benefits from its AI models and projects that figure will exceed $500 million by 2030. With E-23 taking effect in May 2027, both companies will need to show regulators not just that their AI systems work, but that they can be inventoried, risk-rated and governed to the same standard as the actuarial models the industry has relied on for decades, a test that will apply regardless of how far ahead either insurer's AI capabilities have moved by then.
