Will Manulife's investment in AI pay off?

Canadian financial services firm Manulife Financial Corp. is banking on artificial intelligence being a significant asset for its next project. The company's Toronto-based Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is collaborating with Silicon Valley-based Nervana Systems on a new AI-based application that could help portfolio managers analyze the high volume of online information, financial news, emails, and documents they receive when researching investments. "If you think about all of the things that a portfolio manager or researcher might look at when making decisions… a lot of it is social data – emails, industry reports, stock and economic data," Ace Moghimi, Manulife's Boston-based head of innovation, North America, told ITBusiness.ca. "The system we're putting in place essentially uses natural language processing, supported by an underlying deep learning neural network, to go through vast stores of unstructured data, allowing researchers to analyze the information much faster than they would be able to on their own," he said. The project's genesis lies within the LOFT division itself, which researches ways that Manulife can incorporate emerging technology and unconventional business processes into its products and services – and its Toronto-based data scientists were particularly taken with AI and deep learning, Moghimi said.