Videos
AI Reimagines Group Benefits and Employee Experience
Insights
- Employee expectations are driving a shift from traditional plan administration toward personalized, digital-first workforce experiences.
- AI is creating opportunities to improve underwriting, accelerate claims processing, and reduce administrative costs.
- Moving from pilots to production requires strong data foundations, responsible AI governance, and a commitment to enterprise-wide adoption.
Deb Dey, Portfolio Head, Insurance at Infosys, examines how changing employee expectations, increasing claims complexity, and ongoing margin pressures are transforming the group benefits market. He explains how insurers are evolving from transactional plan administration models toward integrated workforce experience platforms powered by AI, analytics, and connected data ecosystems. The conversation highlights the growing role of intelligent underwriting, AI-enabled claims processing, and API-driven integration with enterprise platforms to improve efficiency and customer outcomes. Looking ahead, Deb argues that organizations must move beyond experimentation, strengthen their data foundations, and address responsible AI challenges to unlock AI's full potential across the group benefits value chain.
Deb Dey:
Group Benefit is a very thin margin, high volume business. And therefore, there’s continuous pressure from a business standpoint. Also, the disability claims have become very complex, particularly because of the mental health dimensions. And finally, the employee experiences are morphing and evolving at a very, very fast pace. And they’re expecting very highly customized, personalized and digitized experience. And if you connect all those three things, there's a big role that AI will play in shaping the next generation of customer experience.
In Group Benefits, it's moving from a plan administration to a workforce experience kind of a model. So, for the longest time, group benefit has been an employee centric, very transactional kind of a model. We are seeing a shift driven by employees’ expectations of digitized, personalized kind of an experience. And therefore, data integration and API will be key. Even from a competition standpoint, we are seeing in short-text, digitally native players are putting tremendous pressure on the legacy carriers.
Buyers are asking for a better simplified vendor ecosystem. We are seeing an increased need for API-driven integration, especially when you think about integration to their payroll systems, like Workday, finance systems, like SAP. We are also seeing an increased need for better analytics when it comes to workplace sort of health dashboards. And finally, reducing the administrative burden has been a long-standing ask in that ecosystem.
AI will be big in Group Benefits. We are already seeing early offshoot of work efforts underway in intelligent underwriting. Let’s take one example in claims. I think it's still very high touch, very prone to leakage and the complexity of claims are rising, like just the disability claim space has become extremely complex. And I think there is opportunity to inject AI in a very meaningful way to drive cost, deliver faster claims and therefore impact the participant in a very material meaningful way.
First, ensuring that we don't run AI as an experiment. I think it is going to be very important that we move from last year pilots that we saw happen to full-time commit and get going on that front. As we see more of those concentrated effort, the next big one will be to address the responsible AI bit of it, ensuring we handle bias, hallucination, those kind of things as those use cases reach out to the end user. Third, the foundation has to be strong. So data is going to be the most important thing.
