Canadian insurers Intact and Manulife are two of only three major global insurers that report return on investment for artificial intelligence, as most insurers fail to clear the “higher bar” of quantifying the technology’s financial impact, according to a ranking by AI benchmarking firm Evident.

Christian Preece, insurance director at Evident, said peers have lagged Intact and Manulife’s financial reporting practices because turning AI usage into auditable numbers requires extra governance and monitoring.

“We see it as a real sign of maturity,” he said. Italy’s Generali is the only other firm on the list to disclose AI returns, totalling about €100 million last year. Manulife generated more than $300 million with the technology in 2025, while Intact reported $200 million, according to London-based Evident. 

Evident also assessed companies’ overall AI maturity, considering factors like productivity claims, use cases and whether executives had AI explicitly in their remit. It ranked Manulife third globally, up two places from last year. Germany’s Allianz Group and French insurer AXA ranked highest overall.

Manulife has reported the most AI use cases of any insurer, Evident said, and has increased its AI head count by 41 per cent since last year. 

Despite being the first insurer to disclose return-on-investment from AI, Intact ranked sixth on overall AI maturity, down from fourth place last year. Sun Life is ranked 21st on Evident’s list, between MetLife and Berkshire Hathaway.

Preece said there could be a “cultural aspect” driving Canadian insurers to disclose AI returns, noting their greater willingness to disclose individual AI projects.

He expects more companies to follow Manulife and Intact’s lead in disclosing AI’s financial impact this year, amid growing pressure from investors and analysts to monitor token consumption and computing costs. 

Intact is “particularly good” at going beyond general productivity applications of AI, Preece said, and looking at issues like underwriting decision quality, pricing models, and loss ratios. But competition is mounting, as firms like Zurich Insurance, which jumped eight spots to finish fourth in this year’s ranking, invest in training AI talent. 

Insurers are dealing with more risk, including climate impacts, cyber threats, and demographic changes, creating a “race” to not just invest in AI but to compound those investments into business value, the report said. The pressures may push companies to focus tech investments on areas with disproportionate financial impact like risk selection, pricing, underwriting discipline, fraud detection and claims adjudication, Evident suggested in the report. 

Manulife is using AI to approve straightforward life insurance applications. Intact said in November that about $150 million of its annual AI returns focused on pricing and analyzing risk, with AI boosting quotes for specialty insurance lines by 20 per cent.

Manulife chief AI officer Jodie Wallis told The Logic that the company builds cost controls into agentic AI systems and is using more “small language models” instead of relying on the “biggest hammer” of large language models for every project. 

She said that Manulife is looking to attract and retain global AI talent by letting tech workers sink their teeth into “complex projects that deliver a lot of value.” Fraud prevention and translation are two areas where she said AI yields financial benefits.

While Intact and Manulife punch above their weight when it comes to monetizing AI, competition isn’t far behind. Allianz has about 900 AI use cases in its portfolio, Evident said, while Travelers is expanding into agentic AI, including working with OpenAI on a voice assistant that handles claims.

As focus shifts from “what insurers are building to the value they’re creating,” Evident expects more peers to join Manulife, Intact and Generali in disclosing “hard return on investment data,” Preece said in a release.