What is a Conversational Benefits Agent?

Discover what a conversational benefits agent is and how it’s revolutionizing the benefits landscape for employees and employers alike.

In 2024, we introduced a new AI-powered tool, GrokkyAi, to make it easy for employees to get answers to their health questions. As the world’s first conversational benefits agent, Grokky provides employees with instant relief for health and wellbeing challenges. 

What exactly is a conversational benefits agent? It’s an intelligent benefits solution that provides employees with instant relief for their holistic health challenges.

Let’s explore this new category and why it’s a much-needed solution to long-standing benefits challenges.

Benefits navigation is difficult for everyone

The way employees navigate benefits today isn’t working. When they need help with an issue like back pain or lack of sleep, they need actionable guidance on which benefits provide the right interventions. Instead, they’re stuck calling 1-800 numbers or sifting through complex intranets and dense PDFs, often leaving them frustrated rather than supported. 

HR teams are doing their best, but their work keeps getting more complicated. Companies continue to add more point solutions — our latest research shows 57% of employers plan to expand their offerings in the next year. With so many options, helping employees find and use the right benefits is becoming an increasingly uphill battle.

What employees need is an empathetic resource that understands their company’s benefits and can provide an instant solution based on data. 

Prior to the advent of AI, this wasn’t possible for a variety of reasons:

• HR teams already have enough on their plates, and it’s unfair to expect them to have in-depth knowledge of a benefits portfolio that’s constantly growing and changing.
• The current approach requires that employees understand benefits jargon. Searching through the intranet and reading PDFs doesn’t allow employees to use natural language about the problem they’re facing. For example, instead of searching for “I’m not sleeping well,” they have to look for “sleep hygiene” programs. 
• Whether employees get help from HR, a 1-800 number, or self-serve on the company intranet, they are always directed to the benefits program, not the actual intervention that will help them. So, they still have to navigate the benefit provider’s website or call customer service. This is just another barrier to getting care. 

Generative AI creates new possibilities

With generative AI, we can overcome the shortcomings of the current approach to benefits navigation.

Natural language processing capabilities allow employees to interact with AI conversationally. It can understand nuance and colloquialisms that search engines can’t. It generates empathetic, truly personalized responses in real-time.

AI can be trained with data on all of a company’s benefits programs and the many interventions they include. It can also ingest vast amounts of data on which interventions work best based on a person’s specific gender, age, preferences, and Social Determinants of Health. With that information, AI can provide tailored recommendations for employee queries.

AI can also prioritize the lowest acuity action. For example, someone struggling with sleep might be directed to a 4-week program to build better habits. Taking this approach before seeking medication encourages preventive care and helps reduce medical claims.

With these new capabilities, we can build something new: a conversational benefits agent. 

Conversational benefits agents: the intersection of generative AI and employee wellbeing data

To create Grokky, we combined generative AI with the wellbeing data that we’ve collected over more than a decade. Unlike chatbots that respond to pre-programmed questions, Grokky offers a truly dynamic conversational experience. 

It doesn’t spit out formulaic responses. It processes each query to understand what the employee is struggling with. Then, it analyzes the interventions available to them to provide an instant, personalized response. As the first conversational benefits agent, Grokky is already helping employees tackle weight loss, improve their sleep, find healthy recipes, and more. Learn more about how it works here.