Inside Manulife's Early AI Adoption

Manulife’s Robi Krempus on Adopting AI Early

When generative AI began gaining traction on Wall Street, many firms responded cautiously, often firewalling off the technology from its employees. At Manulife Investment Management, the reaction was different. After years of investing in cloud, data, and machine learning infrastructure, the firm moved early to establish an AI framework across the organization, building governance, risk controls, and a process for prioritizing use cases.

I recently interviewed Robi Krempus, who leads AI for global wealth and asset management, which has $1.3 trillion in assets under management and administration. Earlier in his career, Krempus was a control systems engineer in the energy sector, working on nuclear power thermodynamics and other high-stakes modeling problems. That background now shapes his role overseeing Manulife’s AI platform. Rather than committing to a single vendor, his team has built a model-agnostic framework that allows the firm to mov…