Manulife Deepens Microsoft Alliance to Expand Enterprise AI and Strengthen AI Governance

The Canadian insurer is broadening its long-term collaboration with Microsoft through a new five-year agreement focused on scaling artificial intelligence, improving governance, and expanding AI tools to employees worldwide.

Manulife and Microsoft have announced a renewed five-year partnership designed to accelerate the insurer’s transformation into an AI-powered enterprise. The expanded agreement builds on the companies’ longstanding relationship and focuses on deploying AI technologies securely and at scale across Manulife’s global operations.

As part of the agreement, Manulife plans to expand access to Microsoft 365 Copilot to more than 30,000 employees. The company will also adopt Microsoft’s Frontier Suite and implement Microsoft Agent 365, a platform intended to help organizations oversee, secure, and manage AI agents across the enterprise. These technologies are expected to strengthen governance, monitoring, and risk management as AI becomes more deeply integrated into business operations.

Microsoft’s cloud and AI services will continue to serve as a core component of Manulife’s enterprise AI platform, supporting developers and data scientists as they create and deploy AI applications within a framework designed to maintain security, quality, and operational standards. The partnership also enables teams to make broader use of Microsoft’s Azure and AI development capabilities while maintaining centralized oversight.

Manulife says it already uses AI across several areas of its business. These include sales tools that provide personalized advisor insights, underwriting applications that assist with preliminary life insurance assessments, and customer service solutions that help employees respond more efficiently to millions of customer interactions each year. Additional AI-powered workflows and autonomous software agents are being introduced across technology, operations, and other business functions.

The insurer also highlighted productivity improvements among its software development teams through AI-assisted coding tools. According to the company, developers have achieved roughly a 30% increase in productivity, helping accelerate software delivery while allowing resources to be redirected toward new customer-focused initiatives. Manulife has previously stated that it expects AI initiatives to generate more than $1 billion in enterprise value by 2027, with a portion of that target already realized by the end of 2025.

Executives from both companies emphasized that responsible AI deployment remains central to the partnership. They said stronger governance and security measures are intended to help organizations adopt AI more confidently while maintaining customer trust and regulatory compliance.