Sun Life is expanding its AI tools for financial advisors, building on last year's Notes Assistant launch with a newly introduced AI-powered advisor concierge. The company says the concierge has been used in more than 11,000 client conversations since launching last month.
Notes Assistant, which securely summarizes client meetings, compiles action items and drafts follow-up emails, recently won a 2026 CIO Award Canada. That's Sun Life's third consecutive win in the program, following recognition for its Sun Life Asks chatbot in 2024 and its Iris service desk agent in 2025.
"Strong financial advice starts with understanding what matters most to each Client. The best advisor relationships are built through conversations, trust and a deep understanding of a Client's goals, not paperwork," said Jessica Tan, EVP and president of Sun Life Canada.
A pilot of Notes Assistant found 65% of advisors saved 15 to 30 minutes per client session, the company said. The newly launched concierge tool is designed to help advisors find product, policy and process information faster.
Every major insurer is running a version of this race
Sun Life's announcement is one entry in a genuinely crowded field.
Manulife has said more than 70% of its global workforce now uses generative AI through its proprietary ChatMFC platform, and it ranked first among life insurers in the inaugural 2025 Evident AI Index for Insurance. Its MAUDE engine now delivers automatic life insurance approvals in as little as two minutes, with 58% of eligible applications processed automatically by December. The company expects AI to generate more than $1 billion in enterprise value by 2027.
iA Financial has taken a similar underwriting-first approach, deploying the FICO Platform to automate high-volume life insurance underwriting decisions across a book managing nearly $260 billion in assets. On the P&C side, Aviva Canada integrated Verisk's Xactware suite into its claims environment to speed up property claim estimation and improve settlement consistency. Desjardins has framed its AI strategy around a similar shift, with executive Valerie Lavoie describing the industry "moving from a reactive model to a proactive one, where insurers help build stronger communities."
Not every insurer is framing this as an unambiguous win. Aviva Canada's Nav Dhillon has called the AI-driven talent gap "a defining challenge in 2026," and Trisura's Richard Grant has argued the technology's real value is making human underwriting expertise more valuable rather than replacing it.
Why the governance framing matters more than any single company's numbers
Sun Life's positioning around advisor time savings, rather than underwriting automation like Manulife and iA, or claims automation like Aviva, emphasizes client relationship quality over processing speed.
Laura Money, Sun Life's EVP and chief information and technology innovation officer, framed the strategy explicitly: "As we continue to scale AI across Sun Life, we're doing so responsibly, with strong governance, privacy and security built in from the beginning."
That framing isn't incidental marketing language. A joint OSFI and Financial Consumer Agency of Canada risk report found AI adoption among federally regulated financial institutions climbed from roughly 30% in 2019 to 50% in 2023, with adoption expected to reach 70% by 2026. That growth is exactly why OSFI's Guideline E-23 on model risk management exists, with a 2027 compliance deadline insurers are already building centralized governance infrastructure to meet.
Every insurer named here - Sun Life, Manulife, iA, Aviva and Desjardins - is scaling AI tools that touch client data or client-facing decisions while working against the same regulatory clock. That makes "governance, privacy and security" close to a mandatory phrase in any 2026 Canadian insurance AI announcement rather than a genuine differentiator.
Why this matters for insurance professionals
For advisors, the practical takeaway is that AI-assisted note-taking, underwriting acceleration and claims automation are becoming standard infrastructure across the industry's largest players, not a differentiator unique to any one company.
The more relevant question when evaluating these tools, whichever carrier builds them, is how each institution handles the E-23 compliance work underneath the marketing: what client data these systems retain, how consent is obtained, and how automated decisions get audited.
Sun Life's repeated CIO Award recognition speaks to execution quality, but the more consequential industry story is the governance race happening in parallel across every major carrier, not any single company's productivity statistics.
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