From digital transformation to AI-powered distribution: How Cathay Life Insurance won a Qorus award
Theresa Lin, Executive Vice President of Cathay Life Insurance, shares how APEX is transforming the way insurance agents work by integrating AI across the sales journey.
In this interview, Theresa Lin, Executive Vice President of Cathay Life Insurance, shares how APEX is transforming the way insurance agents work by integrating AI across the sales journey.
Winner in the Distribution Reinvented category of the 2026 Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards, APEX combines AI-powered insights with human expertise to enhance agent productivity and deliver more personalized customer experiences.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us more about your role at Cathay Life Insurance?
I’m Theresa Lin, Executive Vice President of Cathay Life Insurance, overseeing the company’s overall digital transformation. My responsibilities include long-term digital strategy, innovative business models, and digital innovation and experiences for our customers, insurance agents, and employees.
Cathay Life is Taiwan’s largest life insurer, serving one in every three people in Taiwan, with a network of more than 23,000 tied agents. As we face challenges such as an aging population and an evolving insurance market, we continue to explore how digital technologies can transform insurance services and reshape the way our agents engage with customers and deliver solutions. APEX is a key initiative in bringing our digital transformation vision to life.
What makes you most proud of APEX?
1. Building on digital transformation to reshape the way tied agents work
At Cathay Life, digital transformation has been a continuous journey of building capabilities and driving change step by step. Over the past few years, we have focused on strengthening digital capabilities among our tied agents and transforming the way they work. Today, 100% of our tied agents have embraced digital tools as an integral part of their sales and service workflows, laying a strong foundation for the next stage of transformation.
With this solid digital foundation in place, we are now able to take the next step by embedding AI into agents’ daily workflows, moving beyond improving operational efficiency to fundamentally reshaping the way they work. APEX is not simply a technological innovation. It represents the continuation of Cathay Life’s long-term digital transformation journey, in which each milestone creates the foundation for the next.
2. Connecting AI capabilities across the entire sales journey
While many AI solutions on the market focus on individual tools or specific use cases, what sets APEX apart is its ability to connect multiple AI capabilities across the entire sales journey, from identifying opportunities and preparing for customer meetings to conducting needs analyses and making personalized recommendations. This ensures that agents receive AI-powered support at every stage of their sales process.
At the same time, we remain committed to a human-centric approach, embracing the principle of “Human-in-the-Loop” and our vision of “AI Agents Support Tied Agents.” AI provides data-driven insights and decision support, while agents bring professional judgment, empathy, and experience to every customer interaction. Our goal is to use AI to enhance human capabilities while keeping agents at the center of customer relationships.
3. Scaling AI innovation into organization-wide transformation
What makes us particularly proud is that APEX has gone beyond introducing AI applications to achieving transformation at scale. Today, all 23,000 of our tied agents are using APEX, with a monthly active usage rate of 100%.
Although APEX was designed to support tied agents throughout their sales journey, the ultimate beneficiaries are our customers. By combining AI capabilities with human expertise, we enable agents to spend more time understanding customer needs, building trust, and delivering more personalized and meaningful services.
What’s the most important thing you would tell someone considering embarking on a similar project?
The most important advice I would give is to start with three “Re”s: Redesign Work, Redefine Roles, and Reskill People, rather than focusing on what technology can do.
AI is advancing rapidly, but technology alone does not drive transformation. We need to first ask ourselves what value we want to create, which tasks can be transformed by AI, where human judgment remains essential, and how we can help employees adapt to new ways of working.
That is why frontline agent involvement has been critical throughout the development of APEX. Their practical experience has helped us rethink existing workflows, identify where AI can create the most value, and ensure that our solutions truly address users’ needs.
For example, with APEX’s protection analysis service, we observed that agents spent significant time before customer meetings gathering policy information, reviewing existing coverage, and identifying protection gaps. Rather than simply introducing new technology, we rethought how work should be divided between AI and agents.
By using AI to handle time-consuming data preparation and analysis, we enable agents to focus more on understanding customer needs, providing professional advice, and building trust. At the same time, agents are evolving from spending much of their time gathering and organizing information to leveraging AI-driven insights, exercising professional judgment, and engaging more meaningfully with customers.
Sustainable AI transformation is not just about making technology more powerful. It is about transforming workflows, redefining roles, and developing new capabilities together so that people and technology can evolve hand in hand.
What’s coming next for APEX?
The next chapter of APEX is guided by our vision of “One Agent, One AI,” where every insurance agent has a personalized AI partner. Throughout this journey, we remain committed to our core philosophy: “AI Agents Support Tied Agents.” AI is not meant to replace agents but to enhance their professional capabilities and empower them to focus on higher-value activities.
Looking ahead, we aim to expand AI beyond sales support into a broader range of agents’ daily activities, including administrative tasks, performance management, and team development, gradually transforming APEX into a personalized AI assistant for every agent.
With the advancement of agentic AI, we envision APEX evolving beyond answering questions or providing individual functions. We want AI to understand agents’ goals and the context of their work, connect information, tools, and AI capabilities across different workflows, and maintain continuity as tasks move from one stage to another. This will enable AI to provide more proactive and seamless support, helping agents complete tasks that span multiple workflows.
At the same time, AI will become increasingly familiar with each agent’s unique working style and needs, moving from “AI that serves all agents” to “AI that understands and serves each individual agent.” The better AI understands our agents, the more effectively it can serve as a trusted, personalized work partner, giving agents more time to understand their customers, build lasting relationships, and deliver truly personalized services.
What would you say to companies considering entering the 2027 Insurance Innovation Awards?
Innovation does not necessarily have to start with the most advanced technology or large-scale transformation. It starts with the ambition to challenge the status quo, identify problems worth solving, and take that first step toward change.
I believe in “Think Big, Start Small.” Think Big means having a bold vision for the future and imagining how we can create greater value for customers, employees, and the business. Start Small means beginning with real problems and practical use cases, continuously experimenting, validating, and refining our approaches, and gradually turning small innovations into meaningful transformation.
I have always believed that “No Change, No Opportunity.” Only by challenging existing ways of doing things can we open the door to new possibilities. Participating in international innovation awards is not just about winning. It is also an opportunity to bring your innovations to the global stage, learn from different markets and industry peers, and look at your own achievements from fresh perspectives, which can inspire even more possibilities for innovation.
So, I would encourage every team with an innovative idea to take that first step. The greatest reward of innovation is not simply recognition but the progress we make as individuals and organizations through every experiment and every change. As long as you are willing to embrace change, you are already a winner in innovation.
What does this award mean to you and your innovation team?
1. Better Together — Driving innovation further through cross-team Ccollaboration
This recognition is not just about APEX itself. It also reflects the collective efforts of teams across Cathay Life in driving our digital transformation. From concept to implementation, APEX has brought together the expertise and experience of our business planning, IT, data analytics, and frontline sales teams. Each team contributed different perspectives and worked together to solve challenges, with a shared goal of creating better experiences for our agents and customers.
At Cathay Life, “Better Together” is more than just a way of working. It is a key factor in turning innovation into transformation at scale. When people with different areas of expertise come together around a common goal, we can create value that no single team could achieve alone.
2. Reinforcing our belief in the future of insurance
This international recognition has also strengthened our confidence that the vision we have been pursuing aligns with the thinking of leading insurance companies around the world: “AI drives efficiency, while trust builds relationships.” We believe the future of insurance is not about choosing between people and AI. It is about bringing together the unique strengths of both, allowing technology to enhance efficiency and human expertise to build trust so that, together, they can create greater value for customers and the industry.
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