Employee benefits are booming—but too many point solutions are causing confusion and low engagement. Learn how AI-powered navigation can cut through the noise, streamline access, and boost ROI for HR leaders.
In the race to support employee wellbeing, today’s HR teams are deploying more solutions than ever before. From digital musculoskeletal (MSK) therapy to mental health platforms, financial wellness tools to fertility support programs, the benefits landscape is rich with innovation.
But there’s a downside: while point solutions are solving individual problems, they’re creating a much bigger one, fragmentation.
In the last decade, the employee benefits market has seen a proliferation of specialized programs targeting nearly every facet of wellbeing. These “point solutions” were designed to address real, pressing needs:
Each of these platforms offers targeted value, but in practice, they are often implemented in silos, leaving both HR teams and employees to navigate a disjointed, confusing ecosystem.
While each point solution delivers results, together they create friction:
The average large employer offers 12 or more point solutions¹, yet only 10% of employees engage with them regularly². And when employees are confused or overwhelmed, they check out.
To solve this complexity, many vendors now position themselves as "benefits platforms", offering a centralized hub where multiple services live under one roof. At first glance, it sounds like integration. But there’s a catch: most of these solutions operate as closed ecosystems, or walled gardens.
Examples include:
These platforms are designed to favor their own native services and tightly controlled vendor partners. If your organization uses a solution that isn’t in their ecosystem, it's effectively locked out, hidden from view, lacking data connectivity, or requiring complex, custom integrations to function.
This approach undermines flexibility and personalization, two of the very things employees need most.
In contrast, an open navigation layer, especially one powered by AI, sits above all point solutions, regardless of vendor. It connects the full spectrum of benefits in a neutral, vendor-agnostic way, guiding employees based on need, not which vendor owns the data.
Another overlooked source of fragmentation? Vendor-led marketing. Each point solution promotes itself directly to employees with emails, texts, webinars, and campaigns, all with different messages, branding, and timing.
The result: communication overload. Employees are bombarded with messaging that feels random, confusing, or irrelevant. Many HR teams have started limiting vendor outreach to protect employees from benefits fatigue.
This communication chaos isn’t just annoying, it’s a missed opportunity for impact. When benefits feel noisy or irrelevant, engagement plummets.
Grokker’s latest research report, Can AI Solve Point Solution Fatigue?, dives deeper into this problem, and the opportunity AI presents.
AI-powered benefit navigation platforms can:
In short, AI helps solve the problems that walled gardens, siloed vendors, and disjointed communications have created.
Employers spend an average of 31% of total compensation on benefits⁵. Yet without clear navigation, consistent communication, and integrated data, that investment doesn’t deliver.
Employees don’t engage. HR leaders can’t prove ROI. And the organization as a whole suffers.
In Part 1 of this series, we introduced benefit navigation as a new category, one built to solve complexity, not add to it. In Part 3, we’ll show how navigation platforms drive real results: improving outcomes, reducing costs, and finally helping employees feel supported, not stressed, by their benefits.