娇色导航

Speaker 1

Lee, welcome to 娇色导航leadership live. I'm Lee Rennick, Executive Director of 娇色导航communities for cio.com and I'm very excited and honored to welcome Laura Money, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer at Sun Life.

Welcome to the show, where I'm so happy to have you here today to talk about all things technology and business, maybe you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your current role. Sure. Speaker 2

And thank you, Lee, so much for having me here. I'm very honored to have been asked, and I look forward to the conversation. So I have now been with sunlight that's coming up on five years come summer.

And as you said, I'm the Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer, it's been a great five years.

And of course, you'll all remember five years ago, we were in the middle of COVID, and so it's been a very tumultuous five years as we exited that and really started to drive forward.

And as you can imagine, the geopolitical situation, given the global nature of our business has also been a really interesting aspect to navigate that, frankly, I'd never had a direct experience with Speaker 1 before.

Wow, sounds like a very transformative five years for your career, so I'm looking forward to speaking about that, and I really appreciate you spending your time with us today here, Laura, so we have developed the series to support the technology leader in their tech and leadership journey.

So the first question I ask everyone this question, can you please tell us a little bit about your career path and leadership journey to date? Maybe you know what you went through, any lessons learned along the way that you could share? Speaker 2

Sure, well, I mean, and I'll, I'll start way back, but I was always really interested in math and science.

And so I I went into engineering, and coming out of engineering, I won't even tell you when it was, but it was over 30 years ago, and I really didn't know what I wanted to do, and I sort of fell into technology, is what I would say.

And luckily for me, it really was a growing fear now feel now back then being a CIO, I don't even think was an option. I didn't consider it an option. For sure.

I didn't see a lot of women role models, because there just weren't a lot of women in senior positions at that time. But I enjoyed technology, and I especially enjoyed the application of it to business problems or any kind of human problems.

I don't think I was as focused on business then as I was now, I know, at first, I was really interested in doing things where you were applying technology to solve like health and those kinds of, those kinds of problems.

I thought was was really interesting, and maybe make cars safer or make furniture more comfortable, that that sort of thing.

So as things evolved, as you know, Tech has just been a really growing field, and as I became more senior, I really realized that it was the CIO, that role, that I thought was most interesting.

And one of the things that I was very fortunate about, I would say two things, I kept myself very open. Whenever anyone said, Would you like to try this role?

I was very open to doing that, but I also realized how important it was to have those advocates for me who would actually offer those opportunities and maybe put me in a position where I was a little out of my comfort zone, even I didn't think I could do it, but somehow they saw something in me that said, Oh, we think she'll be successful in this role.

So I think it's that combination of having the advocacy of individuals, but also being open to different opportunities as they arose, which really allowed me to work in every aspect of technology, as well as parts of the business that touch on technology.

So as as all those experiences came together, they really prepared me well for the 娇色导航role, where you have to think about business, but also deep technology issues.

So I think I got very lucky in that path, but the advocacy and the openness were two things that were crucial to my being able to put all those experiences together. Speaker 1

Wow, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. It's so funny.

I was relating to it very well, because it earlier in my career, when I would get a new job, and, you know, you'd go to the interviews, and you'd feel really good, and you were explaining what you could do and what you understood.

And then I would get the job, and I have a best friend, you know, and he would always, like, pick me up and work, or bring me some rows and say congratulations. And I would say, Do you think I can do it?

You know, that sense of like, also, I think you like you said, having that community, that advocacy for you is so important, because he would just look at me and go, like, I don't even know why you're telling me this.

You, of course you can, you know, yeah, but it's really important, and so I really appreciate you sharing that with me. And you know, you've touched on it a bit.

But as a woman at CIO, you know mentorship, or I call it mentorship, is such an important part of you know, really advancing careers of women in the tech industry. I try and support hacker gal. It's for young girls that are interested in technology to feel supported.

Could you share any personal experiences or initiatives that have been particularly impactful in Foster. Offering both growth and opportunities for women in the field. Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks.

Thanks so much. And, you know, there's been a lot of work about and articles about women leaning in about mentorship. I'm a big believer in sponsorship over mentorship. And I'll, I'll explain what that what I mean by that.

You know, I think of mentorship as somebody who's going to be a good sounding board, somebody who can maybe coach you through some difficult moments, and that's helpful, and to your point where you have people who are going to say, of course, you can do it.

You know, we you're more than capable of doing this stuff and sort of just giving you that little bit of confidence and affirmation that you're very you're very capable.

Sponsorship goes beyond that, and it's really about people who will take a risk on you, will put you in front of the board.

Maybe well before you're you're really feeling ready that you want to go to the board, maybe that will put you in a role that you have no real background for I remember working at one organization, one of the banks, and I was in a role doing end user support.

It had all the, basically all the equipment was outside of the data center, and so I had, you know, the service desk, and I had all the laptops, all the printers, but also all the trade floors.

And I really didn't have a background at all for that kind of, that kind of thing. I'd come more from the application side, maybe the architecture and strategy side.

Really not at all anything to do with infrastructure, end user computing, service desk, and that was probably one of the most rewarding jobs. Ultimately, it was a difficult job every day. There was in no aspect of that role, was I an expert?

I was not a service desk expert, I was not a Microsoft expert, I was not a laptop expert, I was certainly not a printer expert. I'm really happy we have so many fewer printers now.

You really, I really learned in that, in that role, to trust the team, but also gave me a really healthy respect for what the infrastructure side of technology does and how hard it is just to deliver a reliable service.

Every day it is hard, hard work, and so I never now underestimate the importance of that as well as it gave me a real health and dose of reality around cybersecurity and how difficult it is to protect an organization when you've got 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of endpoints, all of which have to be protected and are a potential vulnerability or vector.

So I've veered off course a little bit, a little bit, but I would say it's really those sponsors who make a difference and allow your career to grow, because they are willing to take the risk and enable you to have the opportunities that allow you to grow in a way that you know, if you were always dependent on what you'd actually done, you might not be able to Speaker 1 Right, Right exactly.

And it sounds like from your part, you've got, you know, people who have been sponsors to you, but you also are very invested in continuous learning and maybe taking chances.

I mean, I don't know you've already got the background and the skills, but you're looking at saying, Well, I can actually come into this role. I can continue to learn. And I think that's one thing that's super important, too.

And I try and, you know, talk to women who are coming in leadership roles. Always continuously learn, listen to those team members, you know. And like you said, the trust of those team members is really important too, so I appreciate that feedback.

Okay, so next week, I'm heading up to San Jose to go to one of our conferences. IDC directors will be talking specifically about generative AI, you know, things, I'll be hosting a panel on a genetic AI, super excited about that.

I know that Sun Life has been making really great strides. It's in its Gen AI, journey. So, you know, I'd love to hear some of your insights into the process, and maybe you know any challenges you might have faced and successes you've achieved so far, Speaker 2

sure, you can't go anywhere and still, and it's been a couple years now, you can't go anywhere in tech and not talk about generative AI or AI in general, in fact.

And it really has been an incredible opportunity to use a new tool to help our business, businesses progress and help technology be more efficient as well. And it really does transform the way we're working, so we can be better at our meeting our clients needs and moving faster.

And all those aspects and everything, everything you read at you know we're I think what we were lucky about is our CEO, Kevin strain was really keen right from the start that we understand the technology and understand how it could be used.

And one of the very first things we did was to create a safe and secure internal chat bot. We call it sunlight pass. It's got well over a million queries. We're seeing over 20,000 visits to beat. And employee. Employees are using it for a whole variety of tasks.

I love what they're using it for. I'm less concerned about what they're using for other but I what I'm thrilled about is people are using it, and they're starting to understand what this technology is capable of. And to me, that's the most important thing.

Sure, people have used it to build scripts for videos. They've used it to analyze reports. In some case, people have used it for coding, even though we have, you know, copilot for GitHub.

But we are actually finding that it's the learning and understanding of it that is really perhaps the most valuable thing, and we've provided training to all our employees around AI and generative AI.

Again, that's more from the point of view of if all the employees understand the capabilities and what the potential of this technology is, then we have all those different ways that we might be able to innovate.

In fact, in 2024 just last year, we were recognized by 娇色导航awards Canada for our innovation with some like that. Yeah, but we've, you know, we've taken it. We have, we have a Gen AI Iris, our chat bot, which is helping our Service Desk support our employees.

So that's our internal IT help desk, so it's actually able to answer about 80% of employee queries, which reduces, for those 80% of queries, the resolution time from 12 to two minutes. And that's where we're really starting to test and learn in a real environment with agentic AI.

So the intent is that IRIS will be able to do everything that the Service Desk can do in terms of those simple asks, and, you know, order a new phone, order a new screen, reset passwords.

Of course, that's been around for a while, but it's, it's been really helpful, and because of that, we now have saw squads. Jenny I squad seated in each of our business groups, and they have a big, long backlog of things that they're they're working through.

So our employees are have been so enthusiastic that they actually organize themselves into functional a multi function team to actually have set our guardrails. So up until now, we have not had Gen AI interact directly with clients.

We've always kept the people in the loop, and that was one of the first guardrails. And of course, there's guardrails around data, there's guardrails around privacy, there's guardrails around new technologies, but they've also allowed us to go fast with certain types of Gen AI.

So Chatbot is a good one, we now have the ability to build, in a matter of days, a chat bot that can be based on any knowledge base. And so because we can do that, you can imagine, there's literally backlogs.

And I would say probably we now have 10s of these that are live, and hundreds in backlogs, because, for example, one of the first ones we did was the HR policies and procedures. How many times have you wanted to know?

Oh, you know, what's the limit for, I don't know, lunch for two colleagues when you're doing the coaching session. Well, now you can put that in and immediately get an answer, rather than having to find the email, where is that linked? Policy, etc, etc.

So, so that proved really useful. It proved useful in different contact centers for different types of you know, when we have complex knowledge bases and and again, those are just evolving to be more and more sophisticated.

And so that safe adoption is something that we're really focused on as well and as part of the training, and has been part of the guardrails that people have have put in place, that they actually self organized and realized as employees.

If we don't do this safely, we're not going to be able to be effective at it. So that's probably our biggest learning, is involve, involve the and help entice the broader team into understanding the capabilities of the technology.

And then the other one that we're really thinking a lot about now is change management. So there's a good portion of our employees who just immediately embrace Gen AI. They love it. They want to use it for all sorts of things. But that's not everybody.

So you really need to think about, how do you manage through some of the change for some of our employees? And of course, that helps with the communication, leader, advocacy, great stories and testimonials.

So those are, those are some of the, those are some of the things that we're we're doing, but it's, yeah, and don't be afraid to fail. We've worked a lot on that. Don't be afraid to fail. Pivot and, yeah, you know, move Unknown Speaker forward.

It's Speaker 1 very inspiring.

And I'm just thinking, you know, I always say, now every company is a technology company, but also you're a people company, right? So. You've really your your customers are people like me.

Who are, you know, trying to have the best service or get the best service they can from you.

And your people are also your customers, and you've really embraced that, and it's, it's highly inspirational, and I'm really hoping that one day I'll be able to get you on a panel, on a stage, so we can talk about it further, because I find it extremely Yeah, just your approach to it.

I had, I was brought on a vendor call last week, and they were talking about all the layers, you know, you could apply genetic and Gen AI, and it sounds like you're just miles ahead of where most organizations are. So congratulations for that.

And as we're wrapping up, you know, I always ask this question as well, any predictions on how you see technology continue to lead and impact business, you know, for the remainder of the year. Speaker 3

Oh, just for the year. Oh my gosh, I'll keep going further. Speaker 1

Because if you said quantum, I would love that, because I no one will talk to you about quantum these days, but for as long as you want. Speaker 2 Yeah.

Well, I do. I do think, you know, with the geopolitical situation and just so much is unstable, I think there is going to be a doubling down on focus in terms of cost and productivity, in terms of technology, but in terms of business overall.

And of course, I see Gen AI and automation as really helping us be able to do more with the same amount, or maybe do more with even a little bit less. And so I think those are tools that we're going to have to leverage even more.

And they'll be, you know, we have done a lot of experimenting with Gen AI. We've done a reasonable amount of actually putting it into production and leveraging it for improved client service, and even some, I would say, cost avoidance.

But I think there's going to be a doubling down in terms of how you start using this to really have not just a client impact, but also probably bottom line impact as well, or at least to avoid any increase in costs.

So I think in a in an uncertain environment, that's what we're going to see. I do think, I do think quantum will will come for sure, but I do hope that it's used in terms of health Speaker 1 breakthrough.

So that's really interesting, chatting with me about that, because usually people are just like, I just don't want to talk about quantum right now, so I appreciate that, and I really appreciate you joining me here today. Laura, extremely informative interview. It was just fantastic. Thank you. Speaker 4

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. Absolutely thank you. Speaker 1

And if you're wanting to watch this or other interviews, please head on over to cio.com thanks again. Unknown Speaker Thanks so much.

Take care. Lee, you.