In a period of intense inflation strain, employers who cannot offer financial remuneration to their employees can turn to an employee benefits programme to support their workforce and aid retention. According to research from Peninsula Group, 2024 saw a 131% increase in reward and recognition incentives year-on-year.
Offering employees retail benefits, lifestyle products (such as gift cards), an employee assistance programme (EAP), and self-service physical and mental wellbeing content is a great way to reward and engage employees. However, in a company with 1,000 employees, for example, managing it can become a task in itself, especially with limited staff to administer it.
Read more: The new frontier of employee engagement: Personalised benefits
Here’s where technology, such as a 24/7 AI-powered chatbot or self-service platform, provides the HR sector with an edge. From a business perspective, employee benefits businesses that embed AI effectively have the opportunity for considerable growth in a sustainable manner, with an exponential increase in the number of employees they serve.
The benefits of AI in benefits
In some ways, an employee benefits platform is purely a retail site offered by an employer. Here, AI can make appropriate employee benefit recommendations, understand orders and deliver what each user needs at the right time.
A good AI use case is segmentation, where relevant content gets delivered to an employee’s inbox or is visible on the platform across their preferred channels and is customised to their needs, all while understanding what else they might benefit from.
For HR professionals, AI lightens the load of manual effort, not duplicating cumbersome tasks. For instance, it can help employers with the ultimate responsibility to approve and reject orders, ensure that salary sacrifice doesn’t drop an employee below the national living wage, or manage the complexities of salary sacrifice from multiple providers.
Read more: Employee benefits
Fraud screening tools help control the growing number of fraud cases by saving employers time applying their checks. AI gathers data and proposes an informed choice for decision-makers, checking the areas that need consideration, all while retaining confidentiality due to the number of manual administrative tasks that can be avoided.
AI can also help with the management of information by building complex patterns, showing reductions or increases in engagement from particular departments with recognition programmes. It’ll show the organisation’s story, one department alongside another, providing an overall picture and offering recommendations.
Ultimately, AI helps transform the employee benefits platform into a true and full financial, mental, and physical wellbeing one-stop shop, which should be part of an employer’s duty of care for their employees.
However, HR and benefits leaders should remember that AI is a decision-aiding tool, not a decision-making tool. A blend of AI technology and human expertise is vital to make sure that the advice or decisions are prudent and correct. Employee benefit providers have a responsibility to deliver AI-driven solutions with the right level of risk management on behalf of their clients, and their end-users.
The future of AI in employee benefits delivery
When implemented effectively, AI can help facilitate the delivery of a multi-channel employee benefits programme, enabling access through voice assistants and chatbots according to employees' needs.
Taking a user-first approach will enable the broadest range of employees to get answers to their questions, resolve issues, and access benefits at any point. Accessibility, convenience, and connectivity for employees should be considered a priority, as should users’ level of technical skills.
Read more: Cover story: What benefits do your employees really care about?
We will see AI in employee benefits pivot towards highly personalised content and, as hardware solutions improve, ubiquitous computing. This means that an organisation’s website, portal and app can all be completely tailored to an individual’s access needs in terms of their personalised benefits and any support they may need and delivered in any setting.
AI is a game-changing technology that will benefit all by better supporting employees at an individual level while reducing administrative HR burden, thereby improving retention and the bottom line.
By Georgios Michalakidis, CTO at Perkbox Vivup Group
