Manulife Financial Corporation has entered into a partnership with Akka to build and deploy an enterprise agentic AI platform that can understand tasks, make decisions, and take action to support customers and colleagues. The collaboration will provide a secure and scalable software foundation, leveraging Akka’s durable, highly available runtime and its capabilities in orchestration, agent creation, memory management, and stream processing to accelerate the rollout of AI‑powered solutions across the organization.
Akka’s platform is designed for regulated industries and offers a robust architecture that supports high‑volume, mission‑critical workloads. By integrating Akka’s technology, Manulife aims to strengthen the security, reliability, and performance of its AI platform, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and the company’s Responsible AI Principles while enabling rapid deployment of new AI services.
Manulife has been investing in AI since 2016 and now operates a dedicated team of data scientists and machine learning engineers that provide GenAI tools to its workforce. The company’s Q4 2025 results, released on February 11 2026, showed record core earnings and a 10.2% increase in its quarterly dividend. In December 2025, Manulife announced a partnership with Adaptive ML to add reinforcement‑learning capabilities, and in June 2025 it was named the #1 life‑insurance company for AI maturity in the Evident AI Index for Insurance.
The partnership is expected to generate over $1 billion of enterprise value by 2027, with roughly one‑fifth of that value coming from improved operational efficiency. By embedding AI into critical workflows and expanding adoption across its insurance and wealth‑management businesses, Manulife aims to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency while maintaining a strong focus on responsible AI and regulatory compliance.
"Our insurance and investment businesses are built on trust, and that same principle guides our approach to AI. As we explore technologies that can help us scale reliable, compliant and resilient AI systems, solutions like Akka illustrate how enterprises can build and operate agentic systems with the speed, predictability, and governance required in highly regulated environments. Their focus on orchestration, safety, operational SLAs, and system reliability reflects exactly the kind of rigor that supports responsible AI and consistent customer value," said Jodie Wallis, Global Chief AI Officer. "Manulife is embedding AI across nearly every part of our business while equipping our colleagues with the capabilities to design, operate, and scale solutions. Akka provides a secure, scalable software foundation to support high volumes of business applications to accelerate meaningful value creation across our franchise. This partnership is rooted in our Responsible AI Principles, with a strong focus on governance, human oversight, and safety, as we advance toward becoming an AI‑powered organization," added Shamus Weiland, Global Chief Information Officer. "Partnering with a leader like Manulife is an honour for us, and it's a testament to our 15 years of enterprise scale and regulated industry experience. The Manulife team demonstrates the rare understanding of what it really takes to deliver agentic AI on a global scale. Without consistent engineering practices that address a complex and continually changing set of environment factors, AI systems, which are inherently random, will not be trusted to deliver business outcomes," said Tyler Jewell, CEO of Akka.
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