AI and employee benefits: accelerating empathy in the workplace 

It’s rare to find an enterprise team not inundated with questions about AI; and lately, HR departments seem to be fielding an especially high volume of inquiries. It’s no wonder, as the excitement (and concerns) about AI’s potential impact on how we work are at the center of so many conversations among leaders and organizations.   

Against the backdrop of AI curiosity, benefits brokers and advisors have become sounding boards for their HR colleagues. Sometimes, brokers are asked to evaluate different HR technology solutions with AI as a main feature. Other times, they are asked to create or evaluate strategies where AI can be used for process improvement or to enhance the employee experience. 

Needs like these offer an opportunity for advisors to share an important evolution happening at the intersection of AI and HR. Namely, AI’s ability to accelerate — and as importantly, scale — empathy within the workplace. 

Why empathy at work is so important now

CEOs are increasingly aware of the critical value of empathy when it comes to a positive employee experience. Businessolver research found that the number of CEOs who reported seeing the value of empathy to retention grew 19 points year-over-year to 42% in 2023. What’s more, 68% of CEOs believe that empathy needs to evolve within U.S. organizations today, up 25 points from prior years. 

But it’s not just CEOs who see the upside in empathy. Our research also reveals that employees will leave their current organization for a more empathetic workplace. In 2023, 8 in 10 employees, including HR professionals, felt they had ample employment choices and were confident they could find more empathetic employers.  

How empathetic AI removes barriers and fuels benefits engagement

As organizations look to embed empathy within their workplace culture, focusing on employee benefits is an important strategic lever to pull. That’s because comp and benefits are one of the highest expense items in an organization’s budget, but more importantly, benefits are extremely important to employees as they evaluate whether to join or stay with an organization. Unfortunately, there are several barriers that get in the way of employees’ ability to effectively choose and use their benefits. In fact, on average, 86% of employees surveyed by Businessolver describe themselves as confused about their benefits, meaning they have low benefits literacy. 

Enter the need for “empathetic AI” technology. AI can be leveraged to further personalize the benefits experience, helping employees in their journey of understanding, selecting, and using their benefits year-round in a way that meets their unique needs and circumstances. 

Empathetic AI, trained by humans, accomplishes this personalization in a growing number of ways. Today, empathetic AI is capable of summarizing plan documents into plain language, offering 24/7 virtual support for employees, and recognizing emotion and inflection in tone when those employees engage with a human representative. 

What’s more, when AI better personalizes the benefits technology experience, employee benefits engagement can double. In fact, employees who utilize enrollment platforms to enroll in benefits and manage them, are twice as likely to engage with AI-powered search tools. 

Experts are building, training, and optimizing AI models to engage with employees in increasingly empathetic ways. Data from employee benefits interactions help build models to predict employees’ questions and offer suggestions about which benefits to select to help them get the support they need more quickly. In addition, it delivers HR insights far beyond call volume and log-in times. The integration of generative AI helps source data and train the models to recognize and respond to emotions and sentiments, to sense anxiety and frustration, and monitor for trending issues across an organization. This level of intelligence provides HR with enhanced employee insights while also accelerating an organization’s ability to operationalize empathy at scale.

Empathy at scale

It’s true that benefits administrators have long analyzed employee phone and chat interactions for employee insights. However, prior to AI technology, that analysis has been highly manual and also tended to be subjective. AI makes empathy intelligence available at scale, in near real time, and helps to remove human bias and errors, while delivering deeper insights. Leveraging AI reduces the manual task of sourcing and analyzing the data and empowers HR to identify meaningful insights and actionable steps.

This analysis is a significant leap forward for organizational strategists. Brokers and advisors who are evaluating different AI solutions should consider it a differentiator. Rather than simply reporting on what has happened between employees and their historical benefits support experience, AI can also predict what will happen in the future. The most sophisticated models can even provide benefits managers and other HR leaders with prescriptive strategies to affect that future in positive, meaningful ways. Say, for instance, that data analysis detects that older employees are beginning to take greater advantage of stipends for at-home exercise equipment. The AI may suggest adding additional benefits, such as virtual workout classes for seniors, to further enhance the value of the benefit. 

This evolution — from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive analytics — is an important opportunity for HR as they look to develop a culture of empathy and balance strategic objectives from the C-suite. 

Benefits administration is fertile ground for AI impact

Businessolver’s 2023 empathy research found that only 68% of employees, down 23 points from the previous year, viewed their organization as empathetic. With empathy in short supply and high demand, there’s no better time for benefits advisors and their HR partners to embrace AI as a collaborative partner to augment already lean teams and use it to scale empathy into organizations — from personalizing the benefits experience and speeding inquiry resolution to optimizing and maximizing benefits plan outcomes.

People and machines have long worked side by side. AI takes that partnership to an entirely new level, leveraging the power of learning to accelerate empathy at scale. Joining together people and AI technology in the service of greater empathy, while groundbreaking, is just the beginning. 

Janice Minn is Director of Product Management for Businessolver’s benefits administration platform. Janice can be reached at jminn@businessolver.com.