Under the Spotlight with Louis Lee

A curious person by nature, Louis Lee has built a 25-year career across Australia and Asia by following his instinct toward new problems and new territory. From general insurance pricing to reinsurance, entrepreneurship, consulting and insurtech, each move has added something to the next. Today, based in Hong Kong, he leads Digital and AI strategy across 22 markets at a top-tier global life and health insurer.

Now a Council Member of the Actuaries Institute, he brings both experience and conviction to the profession's future and a clear sense of the opportunity ahead.

For those who don’t know you, could you share a bit about yourself and your professional background?

I am a curious person and like to solve problems using first principles thinking. This allows me to continuously explore new opportunities and new roles that excite me.

My background spans 25+ years across Australia and Asia. I have been based in Hong Kong (where I am currently) for the past 15 years. My professional career has allowed me to travel to most parts of Asia.

Currently, I run Digital and AI for the agency (advisor) channel for a top-tier global life and health insurer, spanning across 22 markets, where I lead the strategy, development, execution and adoption of digital and AI applications for agents.

I started my career working in Australia for 10 years, as a general insurance pricing actuary, learning the craft of data analytics and pricing strategy.

In 2010, I moved to Hong Kong to become a life and health reinsurance professional, where I spent 10 years at a multinational reinsurer, taking on roles including Asia pricing actuary, product development actuary, financial solutions lead, head of market and Asia CFO.

After this, I decided to run my own startup and learn to be a solo entrepreneur. Although it did not work out, I was fortunate to then spend four years as a partner of a Big 4 consultancy firm, where I started to work on digital and AI projects for insurance clients across Asia. After a taste of consultancy, I wanted to be closer to software and AI development, and this is where I joined an insurtech to lead the Asia Pacific region and also led the AI product development for the company, working directly with full-stack developers and AI engineers to build new AI applications for insurers globally.

Being in Asia brings me a network of professionals, whom I can learn from and gain opportunities to expand my skills. I have enjoyed every day working here.

What motivated you to serve as a Council Member for the Actuaries Institute?

To contribute and to bring something back to the members and the profession.

This profession has provided me a lot in my career - the technical training, the critical thinking, the business acumen and the networking. I want to bring all of my experience to the Institute for our members.

Before I was elected, I spoke to more than 50 members, students, associates and Fellows. I was able to listen to how their careers have grown, how the profession is trending and how the Institute is serving the members. This exercise gave me great energy and thoughts on how I can help and contribute as a Council Member of the Institute.

How do you see the profession evolving over time? Are there any specific areas in which you see actuaries having greater involvement and/or influence?

The world is changing rapidly. The pace of acceleration of AI advancement has been quite incredible. Every day there are new models and applications that are exponentially more productive on work. This applies to the actuarial work.

At the same time, it is even more important for humans to be first-principle thinkers, lead the strategic thinking of the task and objectives and to challenge the work (model) output from the AI agents with business acumen, relevance to the business, explainability and ethics.

Actuaries have these qualities as part of their education, professional training and work experience. These qualities allow actuaries opportunities to apply these skills to industries beyond insurance and superannuation and into all fields where agentic AI will be applied.

Reflecting on your career journey so far, can you share a pivotal moment or decision in your career that significantly shaped your career journey?

No single pivotal moment. I have always been curious and I have always wanted to learn new skills and work in new areas. This also means I tend not to stay in the same role for more than two-three years.

I was very fortunate to learn from great practitioners and great teachers. I learnt not only the technical and business aspects from these mentors, but I also learnt a great deal of how they think and I enjoy the intellectual exchanges over the years.

One of the pivotal moments is nine months into my own startup venture, when COVID-19 hit and it failed. I learnt a great deal from this experience, of which there were two very important skills I was lacking:

1. I did not know enough technology to run a tech company, and therefore, I needed to learn more;
2. My professional network had very few contacts in the tech profession who I could speak to, to learn from them and to understand the latest technology advancements.

This shifted my mindset completely and ever since, I have taken a keen interest in everything technology, understanding why legacy technologies exist, how data transformed into data products, how change management is essential for digital adoption and how LLMs work when AI took off. This curious mindset is enabling me to learn fast in this ever-changing AI world.

What do you see as the most pressing issues for actuaries? How can the Institute help address them?

As mentioned above, AI is an existential threat to actuaries and to all white-collar workers. However, this also presents an opportunity.

I have yet to see AI completely replace human workers. However, I can see how a human worker who has mastered AI and agentic AI, can be exponentially more productive than those who have yet to pick up these skills.

The Institute can help address this by continuing to shape education to encompass the skills that will define how an actuary will operate in the AI world. This includes (but is not limited to) first-principles thinking, critical thinking, business interpretation, model explainability (including LLM and agentic frameworks) and model ethics.

The Institute can also help members by introducing a change management framework for all members to use more AI applications. There is only one way to learn AI, which is by using and learning from experience. Seeing how AI works in practice will unlock the desire to imagine the next thing AI can do, and so on.

What should all actuaries do at least once in their life?

I will be controversial here. I think all actuaries should fail at least once in their life - and learn from it. Actuaries are smart people, and many came through schools and universities with good grades. Therefore, actuaries are not used to failure, which means they are less willing to take risks and try things that likely lead to failure.

However, failing is part of learning. Struggling through failures strengthens the learning.

What do you hope your legacy will be?

I hope to help the Institute shape how the actuarial profession evolves in the world of AI. I believe actuaries can become prominent as AI leaders in a number of organisations across all industries. I would be very proud if organisations turn to actuaries as experts in AI, providing an end-to-end view of AI, from the technical to the engineering, to the benefits and risks, and to the ethics.