How benefits leaders can manage concerns around AI and rising costs

What are organizations’ biggest concerns right now?

Roughly 100 HR and benefits pros were asked this question at a From Day One conference in Chicago on June 3. Three words dominated their responses: costs, AI, and wellness.

“During Covid, you saw…attention from leadership around benefits…and there was a little bit of a softening of that focus over the past couple of years, but now as we see rising medical trends being so impactful to businesses’ bottom lines, cost is becoming a really big focus,” Amy Waickman, global head of benefits at Arup, told HR Brew, during the conference’s opening session.

Waickman shared with HR Brew how benefits pros can address these concerns.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How can HR alleviate anxiety about rising costs?

One of the biggest challenges of our goals is making our employees feel more comfortable. And, the biggest thing around that is clarity in benefits. When we think about how employees engage with benefits, a lot of times…employees don’t care about the benefits until they need them, and then they have a million questions, and they can’t find any information.

How do we enable employees to navigate that ecosystem more effectively, and empower them to really take that on? And, that’s where the future of personalization of benefits comes into play, because your employees aren’t going to remember the communication that was sent six months ago during annual enrollment. They’re going to be: What is the moment right now? I need support. I need help, and how do I get there?

How can HR personalize benefits?

For a long time, we talked about personalization and multiple generations in the workforce, and how to make sure that it was something for everybody…and there is a change there that’s going to start to happen both from a what-people-need perspective and what’s available, but also from an employer perspective around cost and being diligent with our spend and having limited resources.

A lot of employers, we are as well, simplifying our benefits, because we have too much. Employees aren’t utilizing it. They don’t know about it. We’re spending money on things just to say that we cover all portions of employees, but we’re not really supporting our employees to navigate that themselves…and now with AI, there’s the opportunity to help employees navigate that on a personalized and individual basis.

Are employers moving away from offering a variety of benefits?

In the past…everybody was competing for talent aggressively, and so it was basically having all of these things, and now the situation is different…There’s a lot more focus from business leaders to say: Actually, do we need to be spending this extra money in these extra ways? Is this the right thing to do for people? I don’t think the answer is cutting all of the fringe benefits, but I think it is to look very closely at each one, and what purpose it’s serving, and what value you’re getting out of it.

If a company needs to cut or pause a benefit, what do you recommend that they do?

It’s all about how you manage the communication around that. If you’re pausing something for a reason to see what are outcomes or what changes, I think that’s fine. But, if you’re pausing it just because…We don’t have the budget to pay for this right now, and so we’re just going to pause it. We’re not communicating it well, and we don’t know what we’re expecting on the other side of it…That’s the part that can be the challenge.

How is AI changing the benefits landscape?

There’s some expectation from employees that AI should be changing how they interact with benefits as well, and that will be really interesting to see in the next six months to a year: How much AI is going to change their experience with benefits and how they navigate benefit ecosystems. That’s where there’s a lot of opportunity for employers, especially we were talking about that personalization lens, because if I can interact with AI, and it knows me, and it knows my personal situation, it knows my health concerns, my family situation, where I live that all can lead to an improved outcome.