Manulife Hong Kong has been named a Core Participating Insurer in the latest batch of the Insurance Authority’s AI Cohort Programme, a regulator-led initiative aimed at advancing the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence across the city’s insurance sector.

The programme brings insurers and technology partners together to promote industry-wide collaboration on AI. As a Core Participating Insurer, Manulife Hong Kong will contribute to establishing AI Centres of Excellence in the city, support AI talent development through capability-building initiatives, and foster knowledge sharing across the industry and with regulators.

AI moving into core insurance operations

Manulife Hong Kong said it is accelerating the integration of AI across distribution, customer experience, underwriting and claims. Current deployments include a customer-facing AI assistant offering round-the-clock bilingual support, an AI-powered sales enablement tool that gives agents data-driven insights, and an AI assistant that supports agents on new business and underwriting enquiries.

“AI is rapidly transforming the insurance landscape, enabling insurers to reimagine how we serve customers while driving greater efficiency and resilience. Through this initiative, alongside our continued investment in AI capabilities and talent, we aim to scale the responsible adoption of AI across our business, deepen collaboration and knowledge sharing with industry partners, and contribute to the broader application of AI across the sector,” said Patrick Graham, CEO of Manulife Hong Kong and Macau.

Cloud partnership and governance underpin the push

The insurer recently announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud to build a collaboration framework and explore a joint AI hub to accelerate co-development of AI use cases. Manulife said these initiatives sit on top of a governance framework intended to ensure responsible, secure and compliant implementation.

The move underscores Hong Kong’s positioning as a regional hub for AI innovation in financial services, with the regulator actively shaping how the technology enters a sector that handles sensitive customer data at scale. Manulife has served the Hong Kong and Macau markets for more than 125 years and counts over 2.6 million customers in the two territories.

For the wider APAC insurance industry, a regulator convening insurers around shared AI standards offers a template for balancing innovation with oversight — a question every market in the region is now confronting.