Sunlife’s Laura Money on Designing AI Around People

0:00You know, that trust, it's built through human connection. You don't trust a machine, you trust people.

0:06Peter High: Welcome to Tech Innovation. I'm Peter High, president of Metastrategy. My guest today is Laura Money. Laura is the executive vice president and chief information and technology innovation officer of Sun Life, a global financial services company based in Toronto, providing insurance, wealth, asset management, and health solutions with approximately$1.7 trillion Canadian dollars in assets under management. Laura oversees technology, strategy, architecture, infrastructure, development, and applications. She joined Sun Life in 2020, bringing more than three decades of experience across financial institutions and consulting in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.

0:41Peter High: In this conversation, we'll explore how Laura is modernizing Sun Life's technology and operating model, scaling responsible AI, and translating innovation to better client experiences. We'll discuss the empathy dividend created when AI frees advisors to focus on clients, the company's architecture agents, and how she's preparing employees for new ways of working, among other topics I'm sure we'll cover together. Laura, welcome to Technovation. It's great to speak with you today. Thank you for having me, Peter. It's a pleasure for me to be here. Today's episode is brought to you by Tynes 3B. Organizations are pushing teams to move faster with AI.

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1:54Peter High: Employees get the freedom to build, while IT gets the control to govern. No shadow AI, no data leaks. TINES 3B moves IT and security from blockers to enablers, giving teams the speed to innovate without compromising control. Visit the TINES website at tines.com, that's T-I-N-E-S dot com, to learn more and try 3B for yourself. And now on to the interview. My pleasure, certainly. Thank you for that. Well, let's begin with Sun Life. Talk a little bit about the business that you help lead, if you would. Great. And I think you did a really good job in your intro. Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization.

2:33We have businesses across insurance, wealth, asset management, and health. And our purpose is helping clients build lifetime financial security and lead healthier lives. And really, technology is part of how we deliver on that purpose, whether we're simplifying our client experiences to allow people to interact with us directly, or whether we're supporting our advisors, or we're improving operations, or we're doing some new branding and marketing. We use technology all across the businesses, like many do. The important part is that we don't really think about technology differently in the business, really technology, data, and AI are core to how we serve our clients and how we compete.

3:18Peter High: Very well explained. Thank you for that. And certainly indicative of how your team is immersed in so many things across the organization. Let's talk a bit about your role. You have an unusual title, the Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer, the CITIO. Talk a bit about that role and the responsibilities that you have. Sure. So my mandate does, it spans technology, data and AI across Sun Life and quantum when that gets here too. So a large part of the role is really connecting our technology strategy to business strategy. And we are investing in capabilities that will improve experiences and strengthen resilience, create that measurable value.

3:59And you have to believe that there are some prerequisites to that. You really need those strong and secure foundations. You need great capabilities. And then you need the people that can really leverage AI and technology to think about how business could be improved in the future and how we can create and meet the needs of our clients in the future and deliver on our purpose. So it's about people and the operating model and innovation and imagination. And it's really imagining what the future can be, but making sure we're doing that in a way that's really safe and our clients can really trust us.

4:42And we're not giving up any of that trust that we've built. We spent decades, in fact, over a century building client trust. So we can't just be frivolous with it. We have to take it seriously. And that has to be the foundation every single day, even as the technology moves faster than ever.

5:00Peter High: Indeed. Talk a bit about how your team is structured underneath you, given the various areas that you lead within the organization. Yeah, you know, I think it's to me, it seems fairly straightforward. We have some global teams that span across everybody and they tend to build some great capabilities. And we have a shared set of standards and common tools. But when you get closer to the clients in each individual market, I have chief information officers in each of our major business groups, whether that's asset management, Asia, Canada, the US, and they really take those capabilities the last mile.

5:40And those roles are so crucial because they really help us to make sure that the solutions we're delivering for clients make sense in those markets and for those businesses and supporting the employees in those markets and businesses. So enterprise consistency really matters when it's something like security or platforms, governance, but that local context and the ability to know the markets deeply is so important to make sure we're relevant and competitive everywhere that we operate.

6:11Peter High: That's really interesting. And so do the CIOs collaborate themselves to understand a bit more about where there may be common needs articulated within a specific part of the organization versus those areas that are unique to one business or one geography versus another? It's really interesting you say that. There's a couple of different models. I know having worked in other financial institutions, sometimes they're very centralized and the center will build one thing and then it gets distributed out to each of the BGs. That is really not our model. We have historically, I would say, been fairly federated, especially when it comes to client facing or advisor and distribution focused capabilities.

6:54those have really been driven from each market. But it's interesting you say that because with the latest technologies and the ability to build so fast, we're increasingly talking about co-build. And so how do you co-build where we get maybe the best of both worlds with some of the governance standards, capabilities that we can come together and leverage our scale, but at the same time, keep the last 20 % more custom for the individual markets. And so we're exploring that idea of rather than central out or distributed in, can we do something that's a little bit more the best of both worlds? And we're calling that co-build.

7:39Peter High: Very interesting points that you raise in terms of the ways in which you structure that and the advantages you get from the co-building across the organization, especially given the pace of change today, the newness of so much of what you and the team are focused on. And speaking of that, I wonder, how do you see employee skills and roles changing in light of the fast pace of change today? And how are you meeting that challenge by providing the guideposts or training to enable the organization to build the skills of the future? You know, I really believe that technology is moving faster than I've ever seen it in my career, for sure, and probably ever in the, I don't know, the history of the world.

8:23Like every day there's new capabilities and models and scary stories and everything that you hear. But our ability to adopt and use it is still constrained by our own human ability to actually drive value from it and to be comfortable with it and to trust that technology. And so we've, I think we were quite early on in our, in the AI kind of journey. It was probably 2023. I know, I think, I think OpenAI came out with ChatGPT. It was maybe Christmas of 22 or just before Christmas of 22. And by early 2023, we had built something internal. It was our own internal chatbot called Sunlight Asks. And we'd also, and obviously this is generative AI, which has now been morphing into agentic, not traditional machine learning AI that, of course, everyone had been doing for a while.

9:25But this generative AI and having this chatbot early on, I think really gave our employees a safe place to really start to understand some of the capability. So we're now four, well over four years later, and we've provided training. We've moved to co-pilots. People have built their own agents. and as and I think it's actually that journey that has allowed us to embrace you know generative and agentic AI in a different way and for people to be comfortable I don't hear a lot of scare you know scary people who are scared I don't hear much anxiety from our employees we're really taking it I would say slowly because it's over four years compared to the pace of change that you hear with the models.

10:16But we're leveraging it in all areas of our business. Sometimes it's for personal productivity. And I really believe people have to understand how they themselves can use it for personal productivity before they start to redesign processes more end to end. And it's really when you get the end to end that it's impactful to a business. When you're looking at processes and reimagining those processes in an AI native way is different even than process re-engineering from, you know, from 10, 20, 20, maybe 50 years ago, we had, we had a science of process re-engineering. So, so under, but, but having that innate understanding because you've used AI and you've seen it in your own productivity, I think is, is so important.

11:01So we've tried to give people a safe environment, help guide their way to experiment. And as a result, I think we have employees that see AI as a way to amplify their experience and their expertise. And I think people feel safe. So although I think we've got a lot of productivity out of it, it's not a scary thing. People aren't worried about losing their jobs because AI is going to come in and take it over.

11:30Peter High: Very interesting. I want to ask you a little more about the technology innovation aspect of your role as well. How do you think about organizing for innovation? What are the sources of innovation? How do you and your team collaborate with your colleagues across the organization or perhaps even customers to identify where there are needs worthy of innovation dollars spent and time spent? You know, you can innovate for the sake of innovation and then you can innovate to try to deliver on your purpose. And so we really always try to ground it in delivering on our purpose. There's a few things that we have tried over time, but really we're trying to stay on top of the latest technology innovations and work with some of those pioneers in each of the businesses to think about how can we actually leverage this technology to try something new.

12:22But our biggest successes have really been when we've focused on our purpose, leveraged some of the latest technologies. We're big fans of sort of the hackathon type concept. Let everybody go after, you know, give them some time, let them go after some of whatever comes to mind that we can innovate around that will help us achieve our purpose. So I'm not a big believer in innovation for innovation's sake so much as innovate around our clients and our employees and how do we make life better for them.

13:00Peter High: Fascinating. You recently described an internally developed AI agent that supports enterprise architecture. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about how that became a use case and the value you've derived by combining or leveraging AI agents in EA. So that is such a, I'm so glad you asked me that question because I am so proud of my architecture team. They've really taken it on themselves to drive end-to-end innovation all through our, not just our software development lifecycle, but the operate, the govern. and they are probably our biggest users of AI and they've reinvented themselves because in this amazing world that we're living in, they were getting inundated with requests to like look at new things and having to integrate that into our legacy architecture, it was just overwhelming to them.

13:58And they knew that I probably wasn't gonna be able to find additional budget for them. So they actually started to use, you know, agentic AI to reinvent how they did architecture. We have lots of like many, you know, organizations, we've got lots of standards, we've got lots of patterns, we've got lots of technologies, we've got one of everything. And they've actually, wherever that is documented, in whatever formats they've got, it's documented, they've managed to define that base and they have built a co-architect agent that allows them and they'll tell you it gets you 80 % of the way there.

14:38They spend a lot of time understanding what's been built before, where we might have it, what was the solution, what was the thinking, what might. And because the co-architect now just goes and finds that and surfaces it for them, they're really focused on the innovation piece, on the places where you need human judgment. And they would tell you that they've really taken 80 % out of the work out of that initial architecture phase. And that's given them time to think some of the higher level architectures and some of the more interesting issues we have to think about with this AI native world that we're now finding ourselves in four Four years later after chat GBT, yeah.

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16:04Peter High: Grounded in the knowledge graph, Blitzy executes entire engineering epics over weeks of continuous compute, and every line is tested end-to-end before it reaches your team. Modernize legacy systems, close critical vulnerabilities, ship new features five times faster. Learn more at blitzy.com slash technovation. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com slash technovation. And now on to the interview. Super interesting. And in a similar vein in terms of AI being applied to a set of tasks or responsibilities or workflows that allow those who've traditionally done those to be elevated to a greater extent. I mentioned in the outset, the introduction, this whole notion of an empathy dividend.

16:47Peter High: I loved your framing that AI provides that in your setting at Sun Life by freeing advisors and service teams from administrative work so they can focus on clients to a greater degree. Talk a bit about that idea of the empathy dividend you see coming from artificial intelligence and some of the specifics of that. Yeah. So exactly. You've got it in one. The efficiencies created by AI aren't the end goal. They're just a way to create more time to do the things that are more valuable. And in the case of advisors, it's meaningful human connection. In the case of our architects, it's really doing that higher level thinking around design and how things should be designed.

17:27So that empathy dividend really shows up when advisors and care teams and relationship managers, they can spend more time listening and understanding and responding with care rather than doing the administrative tasks of pulling together all the documentation, that sort of thing. So AI can really help simplify that routine work. And I really, you know, believe and I've seen that, you know, that trust, it's built through human connection. You don't trust a machine, you trust people. And especially, you know, our clients are often dealing with us at some of their most toughest moments. And so it's really important at that moment that they connect with a human being.

18:06And the more time and better prepared that human being can be to make that connection, the more important. So, you know, I've been accused of being an optimist, but I really feel that AI can allow us to spend more time being more human than doing the rote, you know, more boring administrative tasks. Yeah.

18:28Peter High: An example of this is Sun Life's notes assistant, I believe. Talk a bit about how advisors, tech teams, compliance partners collaborate on the development of the notes assistant and the value derived from that, if you would. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So notes assistant, it's really a practical example of AI supporting that human relationship. So it really helps reduce the administrative work associated with meeting notes and follow-ups. It prompts advisors and drafts emails, that sort of thing, summarizes meetings. And, of course, you do have, like, we have 14 control partners that we potentially get involved in every single initiative.

19:07And even that we are streamlining and trying to identify so that the people, if it's a low risk thing that we've done something similar before that we know is already going to be approved, you know, maybe like the agent itself will suggest that it be approved. and it's really just a click of the button. But we save the more complex things for the people to get involved in so they can really problem solve around it. So with the notes assistant, we would have gone through that same process. We would have had 14 control partners look at it. And at the time it would have been people, but that is another one we're working on is how do we actually identify the governance process, but leave the people in where we need people to be in.

19:51And we want the people to have their best problem solving and their best judgment brought to the task.

19:57Peter High: Yeah, fascinating. As you've noted some of the areas in which agents are used, as they take on more work, I wonder how do you define their authority in preserving human accountability and measuring the quality of the agent's outputs? How do you think about that give and take and how that evolves across time? Yeah, I wouldn't say we're at end of job on that one at all. It is difficult to really understand how much productivity you really get from some of these agents because sometimes they end up doing things that you might not have done. So is that productivity or is that not productivity? But we define that authority through very clear guardrails.

20:35Agents operate with an approved framework, with very clear permissions and controls, and human oversight built into the solution. You know, one of the things we've learned through some of the training that we've done is you actually have to build the agents around the people. So, you know, in a traditional, I would say, lean Six Sigma trying to process redesign, you know, you're always trying to make sure that the work you're doing is value to the end product. In this case, in the case of agents, it is a little bit of a different mindset. You have to think about where do you want that human judgment in the process?

21:13And where is it important that there be human judgment in the process? And some might call that friction, but I would call it value. you know, it's the value add. It's like you decide in this process, where do you want human interaction and human judgment? And then you build the agents around that. So it is a different mindset than just making an efficient process. And that's how we think about the guardrails. We also have some technology, what we call the agentic control plane. We've gone into a consortium with some other organizations. And it's designed to manage how agents are run, govern, monitored, and maintain across their life cycle.

21:53It'll have real-time, well, it has, we have some in production, real-time policy enforcement and audibility. And that allows us to be comfortable that our agents are doing what we want them to do and not more or less than we want them to do. And so we, yeah, and as I said, we really focus, I find productivity an interesting one because it's also about quality. It's about risk reduction. And it's about are we really supporting the humans who are providing the judgment, the right kinds of support?

22:24Peter High: Yeah, fascinating. Sun Life has organized substantial digital delivery capacity into agile squads. I referenced some of the operating model changes that have been afoot under your guidance and leadership. Talk a bit about that evolution, if you would, and particularly around client journeys that cross business and functional boundaries, how you think about some of the changes and the reasons for them. I'd love to hear more, Laura. Sure. The business outcome is 100 % and that better experience for clients is 100%. We always have to focus on the outcomes. When you think about agile squads, it is continuously improving.

23:03And as we're leveraging agentic AI to increasingly do our coding, testing, spec development, I talked about core architecting even. These squads, I think, will over time naturally get smaller. And we've seen a little bit of that. Certainly, sometimes they get smaller or they get faster or sometimes or both, right? When you have all these agentic tools, and I know I'm sure if I were a software provider, like my product was software and I sold that in the marketplace, I would be even more efficient. But we've seen huge productivity gains just leveraging, I would say, commercially available tools, as well as some agents that we've built ourselves to help improve our delivery timelines and that productivity.

23:49So as we evolve, we are also looking at, do we need to shift the way these teams are structured? And we've noticed that as soon as you kind of resolve one bottleneck, a bottleneck will appear somewhere else as you start to build. So I would say we're, again, And it's going to be a constant evolution and a bit of a journey in terms of how are these squads optimally structured and sized in an AI world. But those are some of the issues that we're working through right now.

24:24Peter High: In light of those changes, Laura, has there been a necessity to change funding models, prioritization, shared accountability? Talk a bit about some of the additional considerations that are necessary in order to breathe life into what you just described. So there's no doubt about it. We work very closely with businesses, as I said, to really, if the business strategy is this, the technology strategy has to be there in partnership with the business strategy. And that's been true for many, many years. And then as we prioritize, we have to really think about where are we going to drive the most value.

25:04And sometimes I like to think about it as a little bit of a flywheel. Sometimes you want to make a little bit of investment so you can reap some benefits that you can reinvest and you get this like great flywheel. But there's a few things we always want to focus on. We really need to protect that trust. As I said, unfortunately, the bad actors also have access to AI. So it does increase cyber risk. So we're increasingly have to spend more of our time thinking about how to protect ourselves in this AI world. We definitely want to move faster. And we really have to reimagine those outcomes. So those are some of the things that are changing is that the actual delivery of technology isn't the bottleneck anymore.

25:53Sometimes it's the governance. Sometimes it's the are we even ready to operate it? Sometimes it's the design up front. Sometimes it's the prioritization. It's thinking about how do we do this safely in a world where the bad guys are ever more powerful? and also what does AI allow us to reimagine in a completely different way and as I said I think this whole idea of reimagining work around where you want that human value and that empathy to sit is is a huge mindset shift when you're I you know I have a lot of process process improvement back right in my background and just being efficient you know you grow up just trying to be efficient.

26:40And then the whole idea that you're thinking about knowing in a design around the human interaction is a, it is a different mindset shift. So, so those are the three things that I think are really changing. It's, it's the, there's really the bottleneck in this. How do you do this in a really safe way and reimagine the work focused on optimizing for different things than we have in the past?

27:03Peter High: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. The sound structure, it certainly would seem to suggest. Sun Life is a founding member of an AI consortium, along with Lightworks, Scotiabank, and TELUS, Laura. That's right. What's been the impetus for the development of the consortium and what challenges or opportunities do you hope to tackle collectively? So as we talked about, agents are, you know, they're powerful, scary things. And you want to make sure that they are controlled, that they have access to what you want them to have access to and nothing else, that you're monitoring what they're doing all the time, that if they drift from what you originally thought they were going to do, that you're aware that if something happens to go wrong, that you have a kill switch that you can kill them.

27:47So it's all that governance around the agents is the core and first deliverable for the AI consortium. It's to build this agenda control plane. And every regulated industry in Canada, but certainly globally, will need to be able to prove that they know what their agents are doing and that the agents are operating safely. Like, no question about it. And so what this agenda is, is a problem that everyone's going to have. So we said, why not come together, build this once, build it together? And I think one of the great advantages of this is that we know that we're actually on par with the industry because there's three different industries.

28:37There's insurance banking and telecom represented as well as Lightworks is supporting us. They're an organization that provides contract stuff, et cetera. But they've changed their business model too to be part of this consortium. So it's actually a really unique capability and approach to solving a common problem. Could we have gone to, you know, a third party systems integrator and got them to build it? Sure. Could we have waited for a Microsoft or an AWS or a Google? In fact, they're starting to emerge now with these similar kinds of capabilities? Sure. But when you think about this is probably going to be the beating heart, a really important piece of infrastructure.

29:25It's really, I think, comforting for me to know that we're not dependent on a third party who could increase the price, could, you know, start telling us how we can and can't use things. And we can't as directly control what the next functions are. So it makes me feel much more comfortable. And, And more importantly, I feel like I can deliver the trust and the safety that our clients expect because I'm not putting one more piece of infrastructure. I'm not putting myself in a position where I'm dependent on one more vendor for one more piece of infrastructure.

30:07Peter High: Yeah. Fascinating. Very interesting to hear more about that rationale. Thank you for sharing. I wanted to also ask you, Laura, if I may, I know that you're a voracious reader and consumer of ideas, generally speaking. What have you recently read or listened to that you'd recommend to others? So I've recently read a book called The Last Mandarin. It's very, it spoke to me. I could really relate to it because it's set between North America and Asia, particularly China and Hong Kong. and Sun Life has business in North America and Asia and Hong Kong. And I had visited mainland China for the first time earlier this year.

30:50And so it also is set in mainland China. It's written by an author called Louise Penny. She's Canadian. She writes primarily detective stories, which are a lot of fun. But in this one, she's collaborated with another author who's Chinese American, and the name escapes me, so I apologize. But The Last Mandarin, it was just a great, fun read. And it really dealt with AI and some of the geopolitics between China and the US. So it was very topical and just fun, but at the same time made you think about some of what might unfold.

31:26Peter High: Fascinating. Thank you so much for mentioning that. I also have to mention, I've never interviewed now 1 ,100 plus interviews, somebody whose name and industry go so well together, Laura Money. Right. Did you have any other choice to go into any other industry than this one, Laura? I think I could have, but I have to say I did get married, but I didn't change my name because I thought, no, I'm not going to change my name given that I'm working in financial services. It's just too easy. People remember it too. Well, this interview is very memorable also, Laura, for the great insights that you've shared throughout this.

32:03Peter High: I really appreciate you sharing with me and this audience more about the great work you and your team are doing at Sun Life, a bit about what you're thinking about in terms of the future as well. It's been fascinating to learn from you. Thank you so much, Peter. It was absolutely my pleasure. And thank you for having such great questions. Thanks for listening to Technovation. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe and leave a rating. It helps more leaders find our podcast. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you next time.

32:36Thank you.