Two Canadian companies cracked the top five of a global list of insurance firms based on their adoption of artificial intelligence technology.
The list was compiled by Evident, a UK-based intelligence platform that benchmarks and tracks AI adoption across the financial services sector, helping companies make more informed AI-related decisions and investments.
“Businesses worldwide are ratcheting up AI investment,” the company states online, and “those that fall behind risk irrelevance in a rapidly changing marketplace.”
Evident launched to generate visibility into the AI capabilities of major companies and increase transparency around the complexities of commercial AI adoption.
Evident’s AI Index provides an “unrivalled benchmark of AI maturity across the insurance sector,” according to the London entity.
The Index evaluates 30 of the largest insurers in North America and Europe against several dozen individual indicators drawn from millions of data points, making a final assessment across four pillars of AI capability: Talent, Innovation, Leadership, and Transparency.
Within Canada, Intact and Manulife both ranked within the index’s top five, which Evident cofounder Alexandra Mousavizadeh describes as “no small feat.”
“Canada is punching above its weight in AI,” Mousavizadeh told The Logic.
Intact scored first across all 30 insurance companies in the Leadership pillar, but fell short on Innovation, ranking 19th.
Manulife, meanwhile, scored more evenly across the pillars, ranking in the top 10 for all four. An early adopter of AI, the Toronto-based insurance giant has been integrating AI since 2016, today employing 200 data scientists and machine learning engineers.
AI is “transformative,” says Manulife chief analytics officer Jodie Wallis, “and it is creating efficiencies for how we work, create, and interact with one another.”
“By equipping our teams with GenAI tools, we’re enabling them to work smarter, move faster, and make a bigger impact,” she noted. “We’ve doubled our AI-driven impact by diversifying and expanding solutions, strengthening data and AI platforms, and practicing responsible AI governance, proving that our teams see real value.”
Other Canadian companies on the list are Sun Life, which ranks 18th, and Great-West Lifeco, which ranks 27th on the Index.
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