Kartik Sakthivel is the Chief Information Officer at John Hancock, the life insurer that turned 164 years old in April 2026 and is part of Manulife. Before joining, he spent eight and a half years at LIMRA and LOMA, the oldest and largest trade association in financial services, which gave him a view across carriers few technology leaders ever get.
Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI into a company founded during the Civil War, and why he tells his teams that what they build today becomes the legacy for the next 164 years.
Kartik and host Dan Turchin dig into why he believes every technology leader should think of themselves as a business leader first, how a regulated industry decides what to fast track and what to slow down, and what he says to people who are watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable.
What You'll Learn
Why uptime and mean time to repair are table stakes for a modern technology organization, and what Kartik measures instead
How a highly regulated business draws the line between internal AI that gets fast tracked and anything customer facing that does not
Why there are more AI pilots in insurance than planes at a major airport at peak hour, and how to find use cases that are neither too small to matter nor too large to finish
The question he asks every time the business brings him an AI idea, and why the answer is sometimes something far simpler
What he tells colleagues watching automation absorb part of their role, and where the time that comes back should be reinvested
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