Evident AI Insurance Roundtable

Introducing the first expansion of the Evident AI Index

Evident AI Insurance Roundtable

Tuesday 24th June 2025 15.00-16.00 BST | 10.00-11.00 EDT

Virtual Roundtable

Event Speakers

Jodie Wallis

Global Chief AI Officer, Manulife

Jodie is a decisive, results-driven leader with more than 30 years of experience developing and leading transformation programs and agendas. As the Global Chief AI Officer at Manulife, she leads the company’s efforts worldwide to leverage data and AI to deliver personalized customer experiences, achieve operational excellence, and support strategic decision making. Prior to joining Manulife, Jodie was a Managing Director at Accenture Canada, where she led the Applied Intelligence Practice. In that role, she was responsible for working with clients across industries to develop and implement data and analytics strategies, pushing the boundaries of applied machine intelligence models to deliver incremental value for organizations and their customers. As a recognized expert in Artificial Intelligence, Jodie was recently named one of the “10 Women Advancing AI in Canada” by ITWorld Canada and “Digital Leader of the Year” by Women in IT. She is also a co-host of the award-winning podcast series The AI Effect and was recently named a Catalyst Honours Champion for her work in accelerating progress for women in the workplace in Canada. Jodie holds an Honours Co-op Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. She lives in Toronto, where she is a co-chair of the organizing committee for Guts+Glory in support of Covenant House.

Dr. Andreas Schertzinger

Group Chief Data, AI & Innovation Officer, AXA

Before joining AXA, Andreas held various positions at Swiss Re. Since 2018, he has been the founder and CEO of iptiQ EMEA Life and Non-Life, a startup within Swiss Re. He successfully developed this into a Pan-European data-/tech-driven retail business, where he demonstrated his deep tech and business expertise, as well as his ability to innovate and to scale solutions across countries. Prior to this, he led the Digital and Technology Transformation and the Global Performance Management Reinsurance teams at Swiss Re, driving profitable growth in Life and Non-Life business. Previously he served as a Partner at McKinsey & Company, serving clients in the financial sector across Europe and the United States. His background includes a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering, with a focus on Machine Learning and Operations Research, as well as a PhD in Corporate Finance.

Colin Gilbert

VP of Intelligence, Evident

Colin leads Evident's Intelligence Team, focused on developing new content offerings and expanding our customer-facing diagnostics. Colin has spent the last 15 years working in Research & Advisory services, specializing in using quantitative benchmarking to measure an organization's digital aptitude vs. performance. Previously, he served as a Managing Vice President at L2 Inc. (acquired by Gartner in 2017), where he worked on the Digital IQ Index® as it expanded to cover nearly 1,500 leading brands across 15x B2C industries.

Alexandra Mousavizadeh

Co-CEO and Co-founder, Evident

Alexandra has spent 25 years ranking and quantifying complex societal and political forces, and for the last 6 years she has focused on AI. She started her career at Moody’s, then Morgan Stanley, and later became CEO of ARC Ratings and Director of the Prosperity Index. Most recently, Alexandra was Director of Tortoise Intelligence, publisher of The Global AI Index.

Watch the Roundtable

Summary

As Gen AI moves from use cases to industry-wide deployment, insurance leaders face the challenge of scaling beyond isolated pilots to enterprise-grade capabilities that deliver measurable ROI. Success now hinges not just on deploying new tools, but on building the foundations to scale them across the business.

Evident’s inaugural Insurance Index roundtable brought together Jodie Wallis (Global Chief AI Officer at Manulife) and Dr. Andreas Schertzinger (Group Chief Data, AI & Innovation Officer at AXA) to explore how two of the sector’s frontrunners are embedding GenAI into the core of their operations. Drawing on their experience, the discussion focused on the organisational enablers, ranging from talent strategy to governance models, as well as turning experiments into enterprise value.

Key Discussion Topics

Embedding AI talent and literacy at scale: AXA has built a deep AI bench with over 2,000 specialists, which includes 900 data scientists and engineers, and now delivers company-wide training alongside executive bootcamps. Manulife complements its talent strategy with dedicated change squads and AI-specific roles, driving adoption of its in-house copilot (Chat MFC) which saw 75% engagement shortly after launch.

From pilots to platforms: AXA’s federated structure, developed over a decade of layering tech, data, and operations, now supports ~400 active AI use cases. Meanwhile, Manulife’s structured approach (pilot → industrialise → scale GenAI reuse) is entering the “build once, deploy many” phase across more than a dozen markets.

Sustained innovation through research and ventures: AXA fuels a powerful innovation edge via a €250mn research fund backing 700+ projects and 400+ partnerships with academic institutions. Manulife takes a targeted approach, leveraging early-stage ventures like the WEF Longevity Challenge to monitor disruptive trends.

Governance that prioritises impact: Both firms take a disciplined portfolio approach. AXA evaluates each use case for P&L impact, balancing short-term wins (e.g. satellite-aided underwriting) with long-horizon life products. Manulife applies a 70/30 split between near-term value and long-term infrastructure or R&D, adjusting over time as GenAI capabilities mature.

Key Slides & Perspectives