It’s 10.30pm and tomorrow night your family are coming to stay. You’re browsing the recipe for the meal you’re intending to cook and realise you’ve forgotten a crucial ingredient. The shops are shut and your work calendar is completely full tomorrow, leaving no time to go to the supermarket. You ask your favourite generative AI platform for a new recipe using the ingredients you have, but it doesn’t quite work how you’d hoped. But not to worry, your local supermarket has next day delivery if you order before 11pm… crisis averted!

In the digital age, many of us have grown used to tech making almost every part of our lives easier… we have information, goods and services almost instantly at our fingertips, at the touch of a button. Yet, for many workers, their employee benefits (EB) programmes don’t give them the same experience. Workers are coming to expect their benefits to be readily available, digital and (most-importantly) easy.

And this trend seems unlikely to change. Market research estimates the number of internet-connected devices worldwide are approaching over 50 billion, up 300% from 2010.¹ The influence of digital technologies on EB presents opportunities for multinational employers and employees alike.

This is a far cry from a new trend but one that’s still important. Just like our late-night internet shopper, having easy access to what you need is vital when it comes to employee benefits. That’s where EB platforms come in.

These typically take the form of an online hub, presented via an app or internal staff webpage, where employees can browse, select and top up their benefits. This ‘shop window’ approach is designed to give employees a simplified view of their benefits – often alongside their pension contributions, insurance policy details, and value-added options like childcare vouchers. Many employers also use these platforms to communicate with their people about company health and wellbeing initiatives.

Experts expect the use of digital EB platforms to continue to grow and for more employee information to be integrated into them (such as annual leave booking and payslip reporting capabilities).⁶ Data could also play an increasingly important role in benefits choices as digital platforms enable employers to track trends across the different markets they operate in, and transform their programmes to match their people’s needs and interests according to industry and location.

What might that look like? Imagine an employee who is a parent: they might receive recommendations to choose a family health insurance plan, sign up for life insurance and buy a discounted off-peak membership at a local gym that allows them to fit exercise around their shift work or busy family life. Digital EB platforms are already used by employers to share health promotional activities like annual flu vaccination reminders. But their reach could be enhanced by personalised prompts (such as prostate or breast cancer screening reminders) tailored to employees’ risk profiles by age and life stage.

You can’t watch TV or scroll social media without seeing a reference to something 'AI-powered' that’s promising to revolutionise the way we live and work. So it’s only fitting that we look at AI trends in the EB space.

AI-powered features have been used for a while now. Claimants submit documents to insurers’ decision-making algorithms, which can review text, images and claims history and forward suspicious activity to analysts, relieving humans of basic administrative tasks.⁸ Out of sight, sophisticated machine-learning models scan data at scale to detect and report patterns suggesting fraud.⁹

Yet AI has plenty of other uses. Many insurers and wellness technology vendors available to multinationals use AI technology to enhance their digital concierge services. These enable employees to book and attend health and wellness appointments virtually, and typically provide secure digital vaults for documents to be submitted and stored.

Chatbots may become more involved in both insurance and wellness technology customer journeys in the future. Virtual assistants could guide employees through the services available to them, set personalised appointment reminders, direct people to policies and services matched to their personal profile and answer their questions in real-time.⁷

And AI can also help multinationals better understand their EB claims data. Multinationals with a global programme (and particularly those writing EB via a captive) get access to vast amounts of data – could AI help them to better understand claims trends and make proactive suggestions that could help them offer more appropriate benefits or tweak their plan design?

How many apps do you think you have downloaded on your phone right now? According to research, the average phone user has more than 80 apps installed.¹⁰ From social media and messaging, to banking, healthcare and even games – our phones and apps are the go-to place for almost everything.

And the rise of wearable health and fitness technology, like smartwatches and bracelets, has enabled people to feed their apps with their own data and monitor their health more closely than ever before.

As well as this, the growth of telehealth services has accustomed many people to accessing virtual healthcare and communicating with clinicians using cloud-based technologies (for instance, uploading photos or reviewing their medical notes online). App-based virtual healthcare platforms available to multinationals tap into the trend of digitally enabled care by giving employees access to a wide range of physical and mental healthcare options around the world.

Many people are also opting to use home blood and urine testing kits or wearable glucose monitor patches which feed blood sugar data into apps which then analyse the results and make nutrition recommendations. While the traditional market for glucose monitoring products is people living with diabetes, these solutions have attracted interest among relatively healthy individuals interested in diet and gut health.¹¹ This might be because certain services aren’t available to them, purely because they’re interested in finding out more about their own health, or because they prefer the speed and convenience of accessing care via their phone.

Reward-based apps available via EB programmes use gamification techniques to motivate employees to engage with healthy lifestyle activities and education. Our partner Humanoo,¹⁴ for example, incentivises employees by running step count, exercise and nutrition challenges and health knowledge quizzes in exchange for points that go towards cash or voucher rewards.

Some health and life insurance companies are offering free or subsidised wearable tech devices. Insurers see value in being able to monitor policyholders’ heart rate, weight, blood pressure and exercise levels, among other key health indicators.¹⁵ The customer is offered reduced premiums to incentivise healthy habits.⁷ On the insurer side, the health data can prove useful when it comes to calculating risk and long-term spending as the insights can help build an accurate picture of health. This strategy bears similarity to the tactics of car insurers who use dynamic premium pricing to reward – or penalise – trackable driver behaviours like braking, speeding or night-time driving.¹⁶