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What do you get when you combine personalised benefits, real-time employee support, and automation that actually works? A world where benefits platforms feel more like helpful teammates than admin portals.
We recently went behind-the-scenes to look at how AI agents are already transforming how companies design, deliver, and manage their benefits programmes.
Here’s how the future of employee benefits is being shaped by AI.
From Chatbots to Agents: The 2025 AI Wave Explained
AI’s been lurking in the background of tech for decades. Think: facial recognition, fraud detection, and “recommended for you” carousels. But the rise of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) has sparked a shift from simple tools to intelligent collaborators.
In 2025, we’re moving from co-pilots to agents — not just systems that suggest or support, but ones that act. These new agents can take multi-step actions, reference complex policy documents, and tailor support based on real-time data from HRIS systems, benefits providers, and employee preferences.
📌 According to McKinsey, GenAI has the potential to automate activities that absorb 60–70% of employees’ time today — freeing them up to focus on higher-impact work like strategy, innovation, and wellbeing.
What That Means for Benefits in 2025
Here’s what we think every modern benefits platform should be capable of in the next 12 months, and what the best ones already are:
1. Hyper-personalised experiences for every employee
Imagine logging in and being shown the three benefits most relevant to your life stage, health priorities, and location. No trawling through 40-page PDFs. No guessing.
Ben uses AI to extract structured insights from unstructured data (like policy docs), cross-reference them with your HRIS, and tailor what each employee sees — down to prompts like “What are my options for back pain?” or “Do I have gym discounts?”
📊 Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organisations will use AI-driven platforms to deliver tailored employee experiences across systems and devices.
2. Smart, human-like conversations about complex policies
The truth is: most benefits questions don’t need a human to answer them. They need accurate, context-aware responses. Ben’s AI support agents do just that: they understand what employees are enrolled in, reference the most current policy info, and give answers that are actually useful, e.g. “Where can I get a health check?”
Crucially, we’ve designed these agents to know when to escalate to a real person. We believe the future is AI + human — not AI versus human.
3. Invisible admin. Zero pivot tables required.
Let’s talk about the messy stuff: invoice mismatches, prorated adjustments, benefits reconciliation, payroll cut-offs. That’s where admin errors creep in and trust can break down.
That’s why we’re rolling out AI agents that quietly handle all of that — reconciling invoices, spotting anomalies (like terminated employees still being charged), and even suggesting actions like requesting credits from providers. No more staring at 300-row spreadsheets wondering what went wrong.
💥 According to Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends, 60% of HR teams say that reducing admin burden is now their top priority — ahead of cost-cutting or even employee engagement.
Meet Your New Team of Benefits Agents
Here are just a few examples of AI agents we’re building into Ben (with more to come):
- Engagement Agent: Designs, targets, and sends campaigns that boost usage of underutilised benefits (like fitness or therapy).
- Invoice Reconciliation Agent: Spots inconsistencies between provider invoices and payroll deductions.
- Support Agent: Helps employees navigate their benefits with personalised answers in seconds.
- Renewal Agent (Coming soon): Surfaces changes in policy documents, flags cost shifts, and helps brokers and HR teams prep for negotiations.
- Design Agent (Coming soon): Benchmarks benefits by country or role and suggests compliant, competitive options e.g. “What should I offer in Turkey for our sales team?”
These aren’t just theoretical tools, they’re already live and being used by forward-thinking companies to reduce errors, boost engagement, and get time back to focus on strategy.
So What Comes Next?
The smartest benefits teams we know are asking the right question: “How can AI help us deliver more impact with less manual effort?”
That’s the question we built Ben’s AI platform to answer. By quietly taking care of admin, surfacing insights you didn’t know you had, and delivering employee experiences that finally feel as thoughtful as the benefits themselves.
2025 is shaping up to be the year AI gets operationalised in HR. And we’re just getting started.
