CDIO Tohru Futami shares how experimentation and willingness to embrace change is helping Aflac empower new sales associates and focus on the human side of their mission.
Aflac’s mission has always been to stand beside people during life’s most difficult moments — especially those facing cancer or other serious illnesses. To truly live up to that promise, we must be available to our customers anytime, anywhere, and with the right support. Salesforce makes that possible.
Before Salesforce, all system environments were in-house and all business applications were developed internally. Essentially, it was an on-premises environment. That made it difficult to adapt quickly when business needs changed. Adding to this, our data was scattered across multiple environments, which slowed decision-making and made system development increasingly expensive.
By moving to Salesforce, we gained a single, integrated foundation for our most important business applications. Our infrastructure became more flexible, our data more centralized, and our teams could develop and deploy new services much faster. The difference was dramatic: Our customer experience improved and our development costs dropped.
Another thing we value about our partnership with Salesforce is that it removes the burden of keeping up with technological advances. Salesforce is constantly evolving and, through regular version updates, we automatically receive the latest innovations without needing to rebuild systems ourselves.
Life insurance is one of the most labor-intensive industries. The more customers we serve, the more people we traditionally needed to handle contracts, claims, and customer support. But in Japan, our working population is shrinking every year. That’s a real challenge — and also an opportunity for transformation.
Agentforce helps us address both. It acts as an agentic co-worker, automating repetitive tasks and assisting employees and sales associates in complex processes like policy management, claims, and after-sales service. By collecting and analyzing information autonomously, Agentforce helps us make faster, better decisions — allowing our people to focus on the human side of our mission.
In the past, what required 100 people might now be done by 10. But for me, the real value isn’t just efficiency — it’s about freeing our employees and sales associates to spend more time with customers and to create new kinds of value. That’s what technology should do.
Project Zero is our initiative to completely rebuild the insurance contracting process from the ground up. We call it “Zero” because we wanted to start from scratch — to reimagine what ideal service could look like if we designed it for today’s digital world.
The first goal is to create a remarkable customer experience, including faster and more seamless claims and policy processes. The second is to significantly reduce operating costs by automating manual operations. And the third is to strengthen business continuity capabilities, ensuring Aflac can continue supporting customers even during disruptions like the pandemic.
To support these goals, Agentforce automates tasks and gathers information from multiple systems, digitally supporting insurance agency representatives in their customer interactions while giving employees instant access to the data they need. The result is the creation of inspiring user experiences, significant reduction in operating costs, and greater operational resilience.
The change for us has gone beyond speed and cost — it’s altering how we serve people when they need us most. Internally, we’re already seeing tasks that used to require many hands like retrieving past customer conversations, gathering relevant data, checking policy information now moving forward with far fewer touchpoints. Our reps spend less time chasing paperwork or switching between systems, and more time focused on listening, empathizing, and guiding.
For example, reps now can prepare for customer meetings with customer history, relevant policy options, past support interactions — Agentforce brings together those pieces invisibly. This helps even less experienced reps offer proposals that rival those of veterans, offering the right coverage more confidently. It lifts all of us.
If our technology can remove friction and allow us to be truly present, that’s when we feel we’re fulfilling Aflac’s promise.
In the insurance business, data is our most valuable and most sensitive asset. We handle deeply personal information about our customers’ health and finances, so protecting that data is a top priority. With Agentforce, we know it’s secure. The platform’s built-in trust layer gives us the confidence to innovate with agentic AI while keeping information safe and compliant.
Data 360 allows us to bring together data scattered across our systems — without copying or moving it — through its zero-copy architecture. This lets Agentforce access and analyze information safely and efficiently, producing insights that improve everything from product recommendations to claims processing.
By combining Agentforce and Data 360, we’re not just modernizing operations. We’re creating a smarter, more secure foundation for serving customers. We can harness agentic AI to deliver new value while ensuring that every piece of information stays protected in a trusted environment. For an insurance company like ours, that trust is everything.
I find it fascinating that there are things computers can now do easily that once required human effort. Agentic AI can process information, generate proposals, and analyze data far faster than we ever could. But that doesn’t mean human value will diminish.
Agentic AI excels at cognitive tasks — the logical, data-driven work. Humans bring something different: resilience, collaboration, and the ability to communicate and connect in ways machines can't replicate. These are qualities machines can’t replicate. The future, as I see it, is about coexistence. There will be times when AI helps people and times when people help AI.
If we approach AI with curiosity and an open mind, we can create entirely new kinds of value together — value that benefits not just our company, but society as a whole.
At Aflac, we embrace a, “Try and learn” mindset and place a strong emphasis on attitude — encouraging teams to experiment, make discoveries, and gain experience firsthand. Even if some things didn’t go perfectly, the lessons themselves would be valuable. That mindset led us to become the first company in Japan to introduce Agentforce, and it’s been a great success for us.
Being first isn’t just about technology; it’s about spirit. It reflects our belief that to remain side by side with our customers throughout their lives, we must continue learning, adapting, and being willing to embrace change.
If we approach AI with curiosity and an open mind, we can create entirely new kinds of value together — value that benefits not just our company, but society as a whole.
Tohru FutamiEVP & Chief Digital Information Officer, Aflac Japan
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