Manulife Selects Adaptive ML as Reinforcement Learning Engine to Scale Enterprise AI

Partnership accelerates progress on Manulife’s proprietary AI platform with real-time model optimization

Manulife announced that it has chosen Adaptive ML to provide model fine-tuning technology as part of its enterprise AI platform. Adaptive ML, a New York-based private AI software company, provides a reinforcement‑learning‑powered engine to fine‑tune, evaluate, and deploy open‑source small language models (SLMs) for enterprise applications.

These capabilities will enable Manulife to adjust and deliver AI solutions that will ultimately drive value and improve customer experience. The Adaptive ML system continuously learns and adjusts AI models in real-time from new data and user feedback. The Adaptive Engine uses reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune models for specific business goals, making them more accurate and efficient over time.

“We continue to accelerate progress on our AI platform and Adaptive ML’s capabilities position us to deliver breakthrough solutions that enhance speed, accuracy, and innovation. In addition to using large language models (LLMs) for certain use cases, the targeted use of specialist language models tuned on this platform will seek to provide both accuracy and cost efficiency benefits,” said Jodie Wallis, Global Chief AI Officer at Manulife. “Manulife is proud to be a leader in AI, and this partnership allows us to maintain a competitive edge in what is a rapidly changing AI landscape. A key pillar of Manulife’s enterprise strategy is to become an AI-powered organization—integrating solutions that deliver value, fuel growth, and enhance the customer experience.”

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The multi-year agreement with Adaptive ML will continue to explore new practical applications such as automating underwriting quotes, executing complex processes, and advising sales professionals. These initial use cases will be the first to be brought on to the platform, enabling broader scale and speed to deployment.

“Manulife continues to demonstrate leadership in deploying enterprise AI at scale, and this partnership is a blueprint for how regulated industries should adopt AI,” said Julien Launay, CEO of Adaptive ML. “Generalist LLMs are not built for scalable enterprise production. Manulife is strategically taking ownership by deploying its own specialized agents using Adaptive Engine as the strategic reinforcement learning operations layer, thereby gaining superior reliability and the ability to deliver cost efficiencies throughout their private environments worldwide.”

Manulife’s partnership with Adaptive ML reinforces its commitment to Responsible AI and sustainability as outlined in its publicly available Responsible AI Principles. By using a model fine-tuning engine together with SLMs, we can reduce energy use over time while maintaining performance.

“Manulife is embedding AI in nearly every part of our business,” said Shamus Weiland, Chief Information Officer at Manulife. “We’re proud to be leveraging the power of the Adaptive ML, which will help us move faster while removing friction for our customers by leveraging reinforcement learning. We’re committed to giving our teams progressive, innovative tools that help them deliver solutions that scale reliably and responsibly while generating value.”

Manulife was recently named the #1 life insurance company for AI maturity in the inaugural Evident AI Index for Insurance, reinforcing the company’s commitment to innovation and customer-centric solutions. Manulife has been actively investing in and scaling AI capabilities since 2016.