Karen Leggett:
I love the saying that says it's not AI that's going to replace your job, it's another employee who's very comfortable with AI that might replace your job. And so the human in the loop will continue to be extremely important, and the innovative thinking that the human brings to the table, coupled with the transformative power of AI that we really believe makes the difference.
Anthony O'Donnell:
I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation. In this episode, we're joined by Karen Leggett, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Manulife. Karen has spearheaded transformation efforts at Manulife, including in the realms of AI, digital transformation and customer centric strategies. From launching behavioral insurance programs to harnessing the power of generative AI, Karen's work is reshaping how Manulife interacts with its 35 million customers worldwide. In our conversation, Karen reveals how Manulife is prioritizing customer experience, making data driven decisions and equipping its workforce with the tools to innovate. We dive into the practical steps Manulife is taking to integrate Gen AI into its operations from the sales process through underwriting and to enhance productivity across teams. Here's our conversation. All right, Karen, tell us a little bit about Manulife today.
Karen Leggett:
Great. Well, pleasure to be here, Anthony. Manulife, also known as John Hancock in the U.S. is a leading Canadian company and top 10 global insurer and asset manager with about 35 million customers worldwide. We're known as quite an innovative organization, and I'll get into that in a moment. But one of the things I would say we're very proud of is our top-tier culture. We consistently year over year rank in the top quartile of the annual Gallup survey for outstanding culture and something we're very, very proud of. One of the ways in which we are very innovative is through our, what we call our behavioral insurance offering.
Karen Leggett:
And this is actually marketed under the name of Vitality in North America and Move in Asia. And what essentially it is, we offer our customers the ability to live longer, healthier, better lives by making innovative technology and diverse partnerships available to them to help improve their health span. And one example of that that I would point to is in the U.S. when a customer purchases an insurance product and enrolls in our mobile application and Vitality program. They will be provided with all series of content related to sleep, nutrition, exercise, healthy habits as well as preventative tools and technology. And one of those tools is actually called the Galleri Test. And this Galleri Test is offered by a company called Grail and they actually were cited as one of the 200 most innovative companies on Times list in 2022. And what it is is an early detection multicancer blood test that detects over 50 different types of cancers in stage one or stage two and can pinpoint with 86% accuracy where in the body the cancer is developing. You know, it's a phenomenal way for us to connect to our mission of making decisions easier and lives better for our customers and certainly connects our colleagues to our purpose.
Karen Leggett:
And you know, in the midst of all of that, we are not just transforming lives, but saving lives at the same time. And so we're very, very proud of that. And I think a great example of how we are bringing innovation to our customers.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Yeah, we've done some reporting on Grail and it's fascinating stuff and it fits in with the overall Vitality and making the point of the relationship, the well being of the policyholder as opposed to the mortality of the policyholders. Very exciting development in life insurance. So Karen, tell us a little bit about how you came to Manulife when you came to Manulife and what background do you have in your career?
Karen Leggett:
Of course. Well, it was very interesting. I actually joined Manulife and was in the office nine days before COVID happened in February of, or I guess early March of 2020 when we sent everybody home on March 13th. So I had just joined the organization in obviously a very challenging time leading a global organization, but not having ever met anyone in person. So prior to that I spent about 50% of my career in banking and about 50% of my career in insurance, primarily with some of Canada's largest bank and top two largest insurers. And over the course of that career, you know what I think I value the most is the privilege I had to have such a diverse series of opportunities that really allowed me to consolidate an orientation towards change and be comfortable with ambiguity. I had the opportunity to run some very, very large to lead some very, very large businesses. I ran mortgages and secured lending right at the start of the financial crisis.
Karen Leggett:
That was a very interesting period. I then led our credit card payments and merchant acquiring business which was very much at the during the time when we had a lot of new payment innovators that were coming into the industry and so again, a very transformative time. I had the opportunity to lead our insurance operations, our call centers, and so did a lot around transforming, automating, digitizing, outsourcing, and just driving overall change for the organization. I've led strategy, I've led M&A in emerging markets and have done large scale technology transformation as well as a lot of digital transformation and data and data analytics work which over time has morphed into artificial intelligence. So really a diverse set of experiences which I'm very, very thankful for.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, this is very interesting. You know, when I first learned that I had a chance to speak to you, I heard that your title was Chief Marketing Officer. And talking about being comfortable with ambiguity, your title is very broadly defined. Your role is much, much broader than the title would suggest. So tell us a little bit about that and why such a role exists at Manulife today. How is today different than say 20 or 50 years ago, such that Manulife needs a role like you have today?
Karen Leggett:
Well, I think that's a great question and I would agree with you that the title is a bit of a misnomer most days, but essentially, you know, we saw an opportunity to very much think about orchestrating our capabilities around the customer. What tends to happen today is many organizations still operate structurally, you know, business by business. And what that does is it tends to force the integration onto the customer and force the integration of the company's products and services onto the customer as opposed to bringing that integration back in house into the organization and making it a seamless for the customer to be able to interact with an organization. And so we felt that was an opportunity for us to really bring together the capabilities that touch the customer. And so I lead, obviously it's a unique blend of capabilities, obviously the traditional ones that you would think of in marketing, such as brand community, investment, sponsorships, creative. I lead all of our sustainability practice globally. And as well, we brought in all of our digital marketing, our digital transformation approach and governance, our human centered design, our innovation team, as well as obviously and most importantly our artificial intelligence. And so by really structuring all of those capabilities under one leader, we obviously work very, very closely with our business leaders and work very closely with our operations and technology partners that are key pillars in our strategy overall.
Karen Leggett:
And so it really allows us to bring to bear, to enhance really the customer experience overall and help our partners and operations streamline, automate, digitize and do so with basically market leading capabilities. And so it truly is an exciting role and one that, you know, as I say, to the team, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. It's less about IQ and EQ these days and more about what I call AQ, which is truly your adaptability quotient. Life will never be this slow again. And at the pace at which things are moving, you have to be comfortable with change and have to have a transformation mindset that is oriented around the customer. So that's really where our thinking has led us, to structuring our approach.
Anthony O'Donnell:
So largely, it's a matter of we're in a phase now where the industry is kind of taking on a different form and you're approaching this Chief Marketing officer role in a much broader way to see where it takes shape. And that's, I would say that's where the essence of the ambiguity is. All right, so let's talk about some of your priorities today. What are some of the highest priorities on your agenda?
Karen Leggett:
So I would say our top priority, and we sort of formulated it as our ambition, which is really to be the most digital customer centric leader in our industry. And we set out that ambition back when our current CEO, Roy Gorey was appointed in his role in sort of late 2017. And we've been actively investing and working against that. We invested about, you know, $1 billion from 2017 to 2023. And we really amped up our cadence from 2023 to, you know, with a three year, very structured and orchestrated roadmap. And that is really again, focused on streamlining the customer experience, making our digital storefronts as user friendly and frictionless as possible. And that also means digitizing and automating and streamlining our operations to reduce turnaround time for our customers, make everything as digitally enabled as possible. And that really has come through significant investments in our cloud and data and AI platform that truly is underpinning all of the initiatives that are leading towards achieving our goals.
Karen Leggett:
And so, you know, when you look at some of the progress we've made, which, you know, again, we're very, very proud of, you know, in 2018, we had a, what we call a Net Promoter score, which is obviously the true barometer of customer experience and what your customers truly think about you, as well as, you know, what customers or people generally think about an organization, we were at plus one NPS in the beginning of 2018, and based on our trajectory this year, we are currently sitting at +25 relationship NPS. So as you, you know, you understand how difficult it is to move the needle on that particular barometer. And so we're really, really pleased by that and we're also hitting record levels of transactional nps. And that is when customers interact with a specific process or a specific property, web or mobile or otherwise in our organization, we immediately survey them to understand what their experience was. And we are hitting record levels of transactional NPS as well. And from a straight through processing standpoint, we were at 68% in early 2018 and we are currently at 88%. So we've made significant strides across so many dimensions.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Yeah, 68% is respectable. So that's, that's a fantastic result. So you mentioned Gen AI. Why has Manulife decided to make Gen AI implementation a strategic priority?
Karen Leggett:
The multibillion-dollar question, I think, you know, if you look at AI and particularly the accelerant of Gen AI, which quite frankly hasn't been around very long, it really, you know, made its foray on the scene in January of 2023 with Microsoft's investment in, significant investment in OpenAI. And what it has done is it has become the most transformative technology certainly in my lifetime that is really in the very early stages of understanding the true potential of it. And I think what's different about this technology is the widespread application of AI and Gen AI across all parts of our business, whether that's in our business segments, in any of our functions, and really starting to actually impact in a material way some of the highly sophisticated knowledge management functions that up until now, as we saw technologies that were, you know, around re engineering processes or outsourcing or things of that nature, you know, those very highly skilled roles were left out of the opportunity. And now AI and Gen AI is just transcending all of those barriers. And so it's truly very, very transformative and we're very excited about the potential and we've started to see the impact of IT enabling us to better serve our customers, to transform our cost base, to drive revenue growth in many parts of our business. And we decided that we want to be leaders in this space, and in fact we've been putting in a lot of effort over the last 18 months. We've been at this much longer than that. But with the advent of Gen AI, we've put a real stick in the ground to say we want to lead here.
Karen Leggett:
And in fact we just had one of the large consulting firms that did an external benchmark across financial services, and we rated number one amongst insurers in terms of our Gen AI maturity and sophistication. We rated number four amongst asset managers and we rated number one in the deployment of use cases. So we're extremely proud of that.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Yeah, Karen, how did that happen? It seems like you had a leg up, like you're ready to go with this. Obviously we've had a couple of years since November 2022 or as you said, January 2023, but it seems like maybe you had the basis of a competitive advantage in implementing Gen AI.
Karen Leggett:
Yeah, I think that's right, Anthony. We saw the opportunity in AI broadly in 2016 and started to invest and create teams and brought in data scientists across our business, but have been really rapidly scaling that over the last three to four years. In fact, we now count almost 200 data scientists and machine learning engineers across our businesses globally. And I think one of the competitive advantages is we've actually embedded those data scientists and machine learning engineers in our businesses and in our funct so that they are on the ground and can really understand the complexities and the nuances of each of our businesses, each of our markets and hence can really start to craft an approach in terms of understanding what are the use case opportunities in each of those businesses. The other area where we invested heavily, and I alluded to this earlier, is really around a movement, a significant movement to cloud and to we're big users of the Microsoft Azure platform and we made significant investments in really getting our data in order and into our data lake such that our AI data scientists and machine learning engineers can actively utilize that data because that's really the gold or the diamonds if you will, that makes a difference in being able to move quickly and deploy use cases. And so that has been another area that we think has competitively differentiated us. And the last thing I would say is that, you know, you hear a lot about organizations that are experimenting or piloting. We're so much past that point.
Karen Leggett:
In fact, we have identified an inventory of about 375 use cases that are mostly triage that we are value stacking. We've deployed 15 of them already into production, and we have another 30 that will go into production over the next few months, essentially over the next quarter. And overall we have a metric that we call value enabled by analytics and we have doubled the value that we have generated from our AI solutions over the last two years.
Anthony O'Donnell:
So just to review a little bit, we're seeing obviously a lot of experimentation in the industry and more carriers than not, I would say are taking kind of a point solutions, experimental approach. But clearly Manulife has chosen to strategically implement genai across the organization. So it sounds like you've got some kind of a central faculty or whatever you might call it that's dedicated toward understanding the technology, deploying the related technologies and identifying the use cases.
Karen Leggett:
Yeah, absolutely, Anthony. We have a, you know, I would call it a very, very disciplined strategy and very tightly orchestrated program that, you know, we have the most senior leadership. I'm part of the C-suite and Roy, our CEO and many of our ELT colleagues actually sit on our governance committee. And it's a priority for each one of us. And so it very much is leader led and orchestrated as one of our top global priorities. And we're really actively doing this in an orchestrated way, but democratizing where we can. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But we're really trying to prioritize use cases truly based on value and the demand is so high.
Karen Leggett:
As you can imagine, everyone wants to engage and look at the transformative nature of what AI and Gen AI can do for their businesses. And so we're really trying to come at it from a value lens standpoint and the ability to measure and extract that value. Secondly, we very much are focusing our use cases on reusability and scalability. And lastly, I would say that, you know, to your point, around many organizations going at this from point solution perspective, we've sort of pivoted away from that and we are now tackling use cases where we're reimagining complete workflows. And we think when you combine those three things, high value use cases, reusability and scalability. And doing that through reimagining holistic workflows we think is part of the secret sauce that has allowed us to really lead in this space. And then the last piece I would say is that it's not just about AI and Gen AI, it's also about the human and the loop, which is an important component. And so we are definitely not just looking at Gen AI because it is an accelerant, but we're combining Gen AI with our traditional machine learning, with our digitization and automation and process reengineering efforts, and coming at it again from a very holistic perspective.
Karen Leggett:
We also, as we create and design these new experiences, we are designing them with the human in the loop as it stands today, but we're also thinking about in the future, where can customers ultimately self serve with these AI capabilities. And then lastly, really focusing on, and I hate the word change management, but really on tooling and enabling our colleagues across the organization to get very comfortable with this technology and understand how to integrate it into what they do every day and into how we want to grow and transform our business.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, what does that mean, though? It's some concept of giving support to colleagues, giving them an ability to use this to improve the value that they're providing to make their jobs easier. How does that work? How are you enabling your colleagues with Gen AI?
Karen Leggett:
I love this question because we were, you know, early on we wanted to make sure that our colleagues were not going to be, we're not going to have something done to them that we wanted them to be equal participants in this new technology, not fear it, but rather embrace it and be innovators in their own right, whether that is in their own personal productivity within their roles, or applying it to how they transform the businesses or functions that they support. And so in April of this year, we actually. Well, earlier than that, late last year, we created our own internal version of ChatGPT called ChatMFC. And that is a fully data protected, permissioned AI tool that we've actually democratized and rolled out to all of our 38,000 colleagues globally. And so every single person in our organization has access to this and permissioned according to the role they have and the access that they're supposed to have. And they are using this tool to transform what they do every day and enhance their own personal productivity. And right now we have about a third of our colleagues that are active users of our ChatMFC tool and that is growing at the rate of about a thousand new and more active users per month. And we're seeing everything from it being used for translation, being used for document summarization.
Karen Leggett:
So, you know, oftentimes we get large regulatory documents or other large types of heavy, very wordy documents that they can upload and get, you know, initial summarization from. They can, you know, merge documents. We've got our marketing team using it to create and modify creative content. The possibilities are truly quite impressive.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, you know, we always think about these new technologies and how they can reinvent some of the most basic functions, some of the most important functions in a life insurance operation. You know, they say that life insurance is sold, not bought. I'm wondering how you incorporate Gen AI into the sales experience.
Karen Leggett:
Yeah, I mean, that was an interesting one because so many people that you speak to see the potential of AI and Gen AI primarily around cost play, but we very much see it as a growth play. And so one of the early cases that we undertook was in our Singapore business and we used it for sales enablement for our agents and we developed a use case that essentially crawls across all of the data that we have on our, on our customers goes out and looks at any external data that is relevant to their personal financial situation and that might be relevant for, you know, the lifecycle time that they're in. And it will create and prompt the agent with anywhere from two to three to four different types of opportunities that the agent can speak to the customer about where they might have unfulfilled needs, where they might have gaps, and then that then allows the agent to be able to create a communication piece. And that communication piece can be either a letter, it could be a text, it could be an email. It really is up to the agent and it will be written in the voice of how the agent wants to speak to that particular customer. So if it's a more, if they don't necessarily know the customer very well or it's a new customer, they may want a more formal tone. If it's someone they know very well, that's a personal friend, it can be a much more casual text. And the AI will respond accordingly and draft the communication piece accordingly.
Karen Legget:
And so the early results have been very, very encouraging. We have about 2,000 agents in our Singapore business that are currently using the sales enablement use case and we've seen a 6.5% higher repurchase rate among customers that are being touched by this new approach. And we have just rolled it out to our Japan business actually early this week. And we will be rolling it out to our U.S. Global wealth and asset management, retail and retirement businesses to our wholesalers shortly. So we've got it being utilized with agents, directly with customers. And we're now also going to be rolling it out to our wholesalers who actually work directly with advisors and producers. So again, there's this concept of reusability and scalability.
Anthony O'Donnell:
And what are some other parts of the business where you're exploring the potential of AI?
Karen Leggett:
A lot of different areas. One of the ones that comes to mind right now is around underwriting. Underwriting, as you know, in life insurance, is a long, complex process that hasn't changed much over the last number of decades. And so it is an area that is ripe for disruption. And so we had already started in our Canada business applying traditional machine learning AI to our underwriting practices and have seen a significant improvement in straight through processing and reduction in turnaround times. And we've actually, we're rolling out shortly, actually in a couple of weeks we'll be rolling out what we call quick quotes. And that's in our U.S. business.
Karen Leggett:
And that is to help underwriters respond Very, very quickly to advisors that might have a client who has a unique health situation and they want to have sort of a pre decision, if you will, before they go through all of the effort of submitting the case. And this allows our underwriters to go from responding, you know, in a, in something that might take them two or three days to analyze because it's thousands of pages of the underwriting manual looking at all the different health criteria that this particular client may be subject to. And so this allows them to reduce that decision down to a couple of hours in terms of being able to analyze that and respond much more quickly to an advisor on a quick quote. So that's just, I would say, a small example of improving productivity. And then more transformationally, we actually have a team stood up that is starting to completely think about how do we reimagine underwriting in terms of the entire workflow. Right. This is more of a point solution that helps us fix a specific problem. But how do we think about reimagining that entire workflow, new data sources and a different way of thinking about how to underwrite our eventual customers.
Karen Leggett:
And so there's a lot of work happening in that area.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, I have one question to sum up, Karen. This is the kind of question I often ask first or well up in the early questions, but I thought because of the kind of the broad remit that you have, and I want to say experimental adaptive provisional approach you're taking to figuring out where the industry is going as it's evolving within Manulife. So I wanted to ask you, how does you work with Gen AI and more broadly fit within Manulife's overall digital transformation? How should we understand your work as exemplifying Manulife's transformational journey?
Karen Leggett:
I would say that AI is the linchpin of our transformation. It is not the only tool that we have, but it certainly is amongst one of the most transformative tools that we do have. And what we're seeing and made tremendous inroads, particularly over the last, from 2023 to 2025, we set out these very detailed roadmaps that initiative by initiative highlight exactly what is going to be tackled, how it's going to be tackled, and then what benefit it's going to have to our Net promoter score, to our straight through processing rates and through our overall KPIs around for a customer being able to digitally purchase a product from us, or digitally transact or get service from us in a fully enabled digital way. And the progress has been second to None. And it's a whole series of things. And you know, I didn't talk about the 15 cases we have in production, but it's things such as, you know, in our contact centers which eventually we want more and more customers to be able to directly self serve. But there are certain types of questions that, that are more challenging. And I'll give you one example, what we call complex contract lookup.
Karen Leggett:
And that's an example of where a customer calls in. And we have this deployed in our long term care business, our annuities business and our life insurance business. And in some of those businesses, you know, the state regulations vary, the contracts are customized. The sponsors of those contracts in some instances, like in group benefits, have different benefit profiles, members will have different coverages. And so it's very challenging to answer that question in that it takes probably a 14 to 16 minute phone call. And the individual in the contact center has to consult a number of different screens and areas. And so one of the use cases we've rolled out, 2 of the use cases in fact that we rolled out is on top of that they would have to actually try and summarize the call and document why the customer called, what the resolution was, whether there was any follow up. And so we completely taken that off the table and automated that soup to nuts.
Karen Leggett:
And so now the contact center representative can devote 100% of their time and attention to the customer. So that's been one transformation that we rolled out earlier this year and then the second one has actually been using. Now the contact center representative through a prompt can query and say this is the customer, this is the contract that they have the policy number and this is the question that they have. And the AI will find that information and will pull it up and it will then provide the answer back to the contact center representative and it'll actually reference where it took that information. And then we have a second model that will provide a confidence score on the accuracy of that answer to ensure that there is no quote, unquote hallucination as we've sometimes heard with Gen AI. And that allows the contact center representative then to provide a very confident answer back to the customer. That is correct. And if they want to dig further, if the customer has further questions, they also have the reference material that the AI model pulled up to reference.
Karen Leggett:
And so you can think about how much that cuts the length of the call, how much of a better experience it is for the customer because they have the full time and attention of the individual. They have a quick answer to their query. And how much it sets up the employee or the colleague in terms of their confidence in the role. Because sometimes they could be someone that was hired six or nine months ago. They might not be as, you know, as comfortable with all the information. And this allows them to be able to provide that level of service and be confident and have that ability to deliver an above grade customer experience. And so these are all the kinds of things that we're doing at a basic level to really drive that digital transformation. And so it truly is the linchpin of our overall digital customer transformation.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Could we call it a revolution in automation with the human touch?
Karen Leggett:
Absolutely. And I think it's just the beginning. Every use case we deploy, we find more dots to connect and more areas of opportunity that we hadn't even thought of that it can start to revolutionize. And we're seeing it across all our businesses, whether it's, you know, in our actuarial part of our business. We're seeing it in procurement and legal. As you think about the contract lookup feature I just talked about and I mentioned earlier, reusability and scalability, well, it's similar type work, right. When you're looking up a contract for a customer in a contact center and we're doing compliance vetting of contracts in legal or in procurement, it's very similar type work. And so as you start to think about the expansiveness and the reuse of this capability, you really start to realize that the power of that transformation that it can have, and it really is about our colleagues being comfortable with that technology.
Karen Leggett:
Right. Sometimes you hear people say, oh, well, AI is going to replace your job. And you know, I love the saying that says it's not AI that's going to replace your job, it's another employee who's very comfortable with AI that might replace your job. And so the human in the loop will continue to be extremely important. And I think it just brings into play more of the intellect and the creativity and the innovative thinking that the human brings to the table, coupled with the transformative power of AI that we really believe makes the difference.
Anthony O'Donnell:
That's exciting stuff. Karen, thank you so much for being a guest on Life Accelerated.
Karen Leggett:
Well, thank you. It's been great spending time with you, Anthony.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Thanks for tuning into our conversation with Karen Leggett. It was inspiring and informative to hear how Manulife is driving digital transformation. Karen shared some powerful insights. For example, how AI isn't just about the efficiencies of automation, but about building more personal connections with customers. We enjoyed hearing about Karen's focus on empowering teams to use new tools and take on innovation with confidence. Programs such as Vitality reflect Manulife's commitment to helping people live healthier lives. That turns out to be a starting point for a range of emerging innovations at Manulife that aim to help its policyholders live healthier lives. These innovations are examples of how, when used astutely, technology continues to further support human activities and how it simultaneously makes a difference in customers lives and on companies bottom lines. To find out more about advancing your own digital transformation, go to equisoft.com/lifeaccelerated.
