Hanwha Life Insurance is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to all 2,728 employees, following regulatory changes in South Korea that eased restrictions on generative AI use in financial services. The deployment begins this month after a training period that started in May.
The South Korean life insurer said on 13 August that employees across business functions identified 58 AI-driven initiatives to improve work processes. Those initiatives will be developed with the IT department, with implementation starting in August.
The rollout marks one of the largest full-workforce Copilot deployments by an Asian insurer to date. It follows the Korean Financial Services Commission's decision earlier this year to relax rules that had previously limited financial companies' use of cloud-based generative AI tools.
AI for core insurance functions
Beyond the Copilot rollout, Hanwha Life has been building AI models for product development, risk-rate calculations, and managing contractual service margins and profitability. In July, the company established a dedicated organization to develop and commercialise these models after a testing phase.
Hanwha Life is also widening the skills base of its business staff, not just its engineers. Two company-wide coding competitions and hackathons in April and July attracted 285 employees, including 190 from non-development roles. The insurer said employees from investment, product and corporate support functions are working alongside IT personnel in an AX project team - a label the company uses for AI Transformation - focused on building internal AI-based improvements.
For professionals in the insurance sector needing to keep pace with similar AI-driven operational changes, a structured grounding in AI fundamentals and generative AI tools is now becoming as relevant as actuarial training. Courses covering AI for Insurance focus on use cases like claims processing and risk assessment that overlap directly with the functions Hanwha Life is targeting.
Why this matters for insurance professionals
Hanwha Life's approach shows what comes after the pilot stage: a full-company deployment where 2,728 people get the same AI assistant, and where the insurer expects employees in finance, product and support - not just IT - to identify the processes that change first.
For those who work in the insurance sector, this signals that the job is no longer limited to understanding risk models and policy language. Working with AI tools to speed up proposal pricing, responding to complaints and modeling assumptions, may become an expected competency in the near future. Hanwha Life has already put 190 non-IT staff through the cycle that goes from identifying a problem, to writing a program, to suggesting a tool to the combine the two. The better trained in Microsoft Copilot and its data limits, the better an insurance professional can make use of the opportunity to automate a daily process.
For employees weighing whether to enter the listing of skills within an insurer's AX projects, the pattern from Seoul is clear: participation is open to non-IT functions, not reserved for programmers. The insurer said that it will continue to expand its internal AI talent pool now that the AI implementation is underway across the business.
Your membership also unlocks:
