How HR and IT Can Collaborate to Improve the Employee Benefits Experience

Healthcare represents the second-largest line item on most companies' P&L statements, yet employees consistently struggle to access the benefits they already have. The issue isn't the quality of benefits offerings. The real problem is findability and fragmentation across systems that leave employees confused and HR teams overwhelmed.

Why employees struggle with benefits navigation

Seventy-three percent of employees say they need more education about their benefits, and only 31% of HR leaders believe their people truly understand the options available. This gap leads to underutilized programs and increased strain on HR, with teams spending about 25% of their time answering routine questions.

The pressure intensifies during open enrollment, when employees are expected to make quick decisions while sorting through disjointed portals, PDFs, and point solutions. Confusion at this stage often results in poor plan selection and post-enrollment support spikes.

Timely, personalized guidance can reverse this trend. When employees get the help they need at the moment they need it, satisfaction rises, support tickets decrease, and HR can focus on more strategic work. Streamlined navigation is essential to driving both engagement and efficiency.

Cross-functional pain points

The benefits navigation challenge extends beyond HR. IT teams inherit integration and security backlog for every vendor. Finance sees missed ROI in solutions people can't find, plus the downstream cost of suboptimal plan choices or delayed care. The challenge becomes a cross-functional drag on organizational efficiency.

IT teams manage multiple systems including HRIS, payroll, insurance carriers, third-party benefit vendors, and employee self-service portals. They handle data synchronization to keep employee information consistent everywhere while maintaining security and privacy compliance for sensitive health and financial data across all platforms.

The conversational AI solution

The answer isn't another system to integrate. Modern conversational AI creates a thin layer that sits over existing infrastructure, using current identity systems and data pipes to route employees to the right benefit quickly without requiring a rebuild.

Three must-haves for benefits AI

Here’s what benefits AI needs to do to address pain points across the spectrum:

• Use conversational AI to unify HR and benefits platforms via one interface.
• Leverage SSO, a single HRIS eligibility feed, and read-only access to policy docs.
• Provide consistent, eligibility-aware answers with deep links to relevant resources.
  
  

• Automate common queries for instant answers in Slack or Teams.
• Help HR teams reduce tickets and avoid vendor-to-vendor confusion.
• Let IT support smarter workflows without deploying new systems.
  
  

• Start with one eligibility file and existing policy documents.
• Use your current SSO infrastructure.
• Expand to additional benefits over time, without complex integrations.
  
  
  

Real-world application

Consider an employee asking about stress management. An effective AI assistant responds sympathetically with "I'm here to help you manage your stress," finds immediate content like an instant relaxation exercise, identifies the most relevant benefit the employee has access to (such as a mental health platform), and provides direct contact options.

The same approach works for questions about medical procedures, sick day policies, or retirement plans. Every response is policy-aware, eligibility-specific, and action-oriented.

The collaboration playbook

Successful implementation requires clear partnership between CIOs and HR leaders across five key areas:

1. Establish a shared vision. Create a charter that includes your problem statement (such as open enrollment confusion or ticket volume), guardrails for security and privacy, specific KPIs like ticket deflection and employee satisfaction, defined scope, and a timeline with weekly stand-ups.
2. Define roles clearly. HR leads on people and policy matters, serving as the source of truth for plans and policies while handling messaging and change management. IT owns security and integration, managing SSO, eligibility feeds, logging, and vendor risk review. Joint governance covers procurement, pilot selection, quality assurance, and success criteria.
3. Map critical employee journeys. Start with high-impact moments like open enrollment and life events alongside the top 30 FAQs. Capture baseline metrics for tickets by topic, average handle time, and policy lookup time. Design clear handoff paths when human help is needed.
4. Run a focused pilot. A 60- to 90-day pilot scoped to FAQs, plan overviews, and one or two life-event flows allows for rapid iteration. Use existing channels like Slack, Teams, or ServiceNow, limiting scope to a department or region initially.
5. Measure and scale deliberately. Track ticket deflection percentage, time-to-first-answer (targeting seconds), satisfaction scores on resolved interactions (targeting 4.5 out of 5 or higher), benefit utilization lift, and HR time saved. Hold weekly reviews. When targets are met for two to three consecutive sprints, expand scope and roll out to more populations.
   
   
   

Next steps

Start with two high-impact areas and your top 30 FAQs. Most teams begin with open enrollment support and everyday questions about HSA/FSA rules, in-network checks, and plan comparisons. Launch where employees already work, using plain language and one-turn answers with clear next steps. Always cite source policies and include human handoff for sensitive or low-confidence cases.

Follow the playbook by creating a shared charter, executing a 90-day pilot, measuring KPIs weekly measurement, and scaling a deliberate pace. When you fix findability, you unlock the full value of your benefits investments while giving time back to the teams who need it most.