Discover the potential of Microsoft AI Services in insurance – A Manulife success story
For AI projects to thrive, organizations need a solid data-based culture and a passion for innovation. Manulife is a good example of how modernizing their data infrastructure by moving to Azure becomes an opportunity to embrace AI innovation.
The organization
Manulife is an international insurance company. It was founded in Toronto in 1887; now it provides financial services to over 34 million customers in Canada, the United States, and Asia. It employs more than 40,000 workers.
To better take care of their clients, Manulife is prioritizing their digital presence as a pillar of their innovation strategy. For example, they became in 2018 one of the first life insurers to use AI for underwriting purposes.
The challenge
Given their size, Manulife relies on a huge global data infrastructure. Historically, several on-premises datacenter providers managed the data. This architecture wasn’t optimal, and Manulife decided to use Azure to host their data in a single cloud platform. Now, they’re fully in the cloud, which entails more than 250 Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters and 3000 cloud applications.
Thanks to this transformation, Manulife could shift resources from workers on on-premises datacenters to specialists in innovation. Then, they realized they had to fully exploit the potential of their data and the Azure platform. The natural next step was an in-depth AI adoption.
The solution
Manulife is using a wide range of Azure products to boost performance in many parallel AI initiatives. The combination of AKS, Azure AI Services, and Azure Machine Learning empowers workers to get more out of the available data. It allows for faster underwriting and more reliable, data-based decision making.
More specifically, Manulife is using Azure Machine Learning and Azure AI Document Intelligence to fight fraud. These tools find patterns in the data that help identify fraudulent claims. This project has substantial potential, given that insurance companies may lose hundreds of millions a year because of fraud.
Meanwhile, Azure scaled up how many documents customers could submit online, which has made more data available for Manulife document intelligence models. John Hancock, the Manulife division at the United States, is using Azure Synapse Analytics to run AI models on these bigger datasets. This initiative is succeeding in getting more insights, ensuring accuracy, speeding up workflows, and improving customer experiences.
The results
Manulife is already benefiting from the advantages of their Azure-based AI transformation. Their development time is now 30 percent lower, and they reduced data-related costs in a 50 percent. Their performance has increased so they’re running more than 50 percent more services than before.
To learn more, read Manulife supercharges development and reduces costs by 50 percent with Microsoft Azure.
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