1. What should we be doing with AI?
At the 2023 Benefex Forum, AI and data were the two themes that dominated the conference agenda. And it’s not surprising with the release of hundreds of AI tools in the last year, most notably ChatGPT.
Gartner reports that 81% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI solutions to improve process efficiency within their organisations. From using AI to help employees with self-onboarding to managing leave requests, or even facilitating employee feedback and surveys, AI promises to make HR processes more efficient and reduce costs.
Most HR technology leaders are uncertain about which technologies to adopt but are feeling the pressure to keep up – 76% of HR leaders agree they’ll be lagging in organisational success if they don’t adopt and implement generative AI in the next 12 to 24 months. Needless to say, there's a lot of hype around AI, especially when it comes to productivity.
Source: Gartner, Top 5 priorities for HR leaders in 2024 report - AI hype cycle
In 2024, we’ll see even more new use cases emerge to create opportunities in the employee benefits space and improve the experience for both employers and employees. Three ways AI will help you streamline benefits processes, save time and drive employee engagement: 1. Faster content generationThere’s a lot of content that goes into delivering a benefits programme – from communications emails and enrolment notices to benefit information pages, FAQs and wellbeing content. Generative AI can reduce the time spent on content creation by as much as 90%, and these are some of the benefits you’ll see:
Time-saving: AI can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks like content review and translation, allowing reward directors to focus on other important activities.
Increased productivity: AI algorithms can generate content at scale, enabling benefits teams to create more, in less time.
Consistency: AI ensures a consistent tone, style, and quality in content creation. It maintains your culture and identity in comms.
Personalisation: AI can tailor content to individual preferences, enhancing the user experience.
Here’s an example of how AI can help you create promotional reward content much faster:
2. Simplified reporting with conversational data
Conversational data will reduce the burden of manual analysis by making it possible to create entire reports or advanced visualisations with only a few sentences of instruction. The ability for non-technical colleagues to use prompts to build reports this rapidly will be a major time saver, and give you a better view of how your reward strategy is working. 3. Personalised employee decision assistance
Employee benefits can be difficult for people to navigate and understand – especially when they are trying to get to grips with complex policies; research shows that 86% of employees are confused about their benefits choices.
The next-level of AI will help employees choose the right benefits and get the most out of the ones they select. Virtual Benefits Agents will be on hand to answer questions, guide selections, and provide relevant help and support. Lengthy policies, handbooks and procedures can be fed into a chatbot that will surface the answers employees are looking for within seconds – helping them understand, select and make changes to their benefits much faster.
For example, if an employee wanted to add their partner to their medical plan, here’s what that process will look like – pretty smooth, right?
The use of AI has raised real concerns about bias, privacy and intellectual property rights, and these issues will continue to be high on the agenda as AI adoption becomes mainstream.
Since the data fed to natural language models can contain bias, there's a concern that the output will also be biased. This could be a particularly thorny issue for HR if AI is used in recruitment, hiring and promotional processes. AI would potentially double down on the human biases that are already baked into those processes. Where AI systems are not transparent in their decision-making, it will be hard to identify and address those biases.
Organisations are also concerned that public domain AI systems will ingest and share sensitive data with unintended users, or be retained in the AI’s network and used to further train the system. Indeed, in a recent AI study, 65% of organisations cited data privacy and cyber issues as their top concern with adopting AI. However, using the latest iterations of closed enterprise AI systems should mitigate this risk. For example, Chat GPT Enterprise has been developed to provide data privacy and security, and does not train its models on business data and information.
Data concerns aside, there are also still some areas of the employee experience where AI isn’t able to deliver the emotionally intelligent experiences that humans can, specifically employee support within benefits. While chatbots are brilliant at providing a seamless experience for those more transactional support needs, there are times when employees will have a benefits request that stems from a very stressful or emotional situation. Employee experience advisors can support employees with empathy and emotional intelligence, in a way that a bot cannot (yet).
For example, an employee might need to make a claim on their PMI for a serious illness, or an employee’s family member might need to get in contact if their spouse has died. In each of these situations, the uniquely empathetic approach of a real human being is still important. Despite technological advancements, humans are still best placed to provide the human-touch.
