Sunlife’s Laura Money on Designing AI Around People

AI efficiency is not the destination. At Sunlife, it is the means to something harder to automate: meaningful human connection.

In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Laura Money, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer at Sunlife, about building AI around people rather than processes.

Money joined Sunlife in 2020 with a mandate to connect technology strategy directly to business strategy. She describes a four-year AI adoption journey, from an internal GenAI chatbot in early 2023 to agentic systems governed by a shared control plane built with banking and telecom peers. Her core argument: adoption, not technology, is the real bottleneck, and AI’s value in financial services depends on what it frees people to do, not what it replaces.

Key insights include:

Designing AI agents around people and human decision-making

Creating an “empathy dividend” by reducing administrative work

Using AI to accelerate enterprise architecture and advisor workflows

Evolving agile teams and technology operating models

Collaborating on agent governance through an industry consortium

This episode is sponsored by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises.

This episode is also sponsored by Blitzy: autonomous software development at enterprise scale.