Manulife Financial has partnered with Akka to develop an enterprise agentic AI platform, focusing on security, reliability and responsible AI governance across its operations. The collaboration aims to deploy AI at scale within the company's insurance underwriting, wealth management and asset management businesses. The initiative addresses key areas including customer service, fraud detection and operational support, whilst regulators increase scrutiny of data use and model governance in financial services. Manulife is positioning the technology as part of its broader digital transformation strategy. Manulife's shares currently trade at C$45.88, approximately 16% below the analyst target of C$54.71. Simply Wall St estimates the shares are trading roughly 64% below fair value, though the stock has declined 11.7% over the past 30 days.

Dutch AI startup Yasu raises €850K in pre-seed funding to launch the world’s first AI Cloud Engineer, tackling €512 billion in annual cloud waste through autonomous, proactive cost optimisation.