Nava Benefit's AI chatbot offers comprehensive support to benefit leaders – Employee Benefit News

To increase employees’ knowledge and use of healthcare benefits, more education is required. Brokerage firm Nava Benefits wants to help benefit leaders prioritize this with a new AI chatbot that takes other time-consuming tasks off their plates. 
Seventy-three percent of employees want more education about their benefits, according to a report from Payroll Integrations. However, adding more work for benefit leaders and brokers who are already stretched thin makes providing that much-needed support difficult. Nava Benefits’ new AI program, HQ, aims to give them time back by assisting with administrative burdens such as compliance, renewal costs and data analysis.
“The more we pulled the thread on how healthcare works in America, the more we realized that benefit teams sit in the middle of it all,” says Brandon Weber, co-founder and CEO of Nava Benefits. “They have the potential to be the most impactful change agent in healthcare administration, [but] they’ve been using the same tools and spreadsheets to support leaders and their employees for the last 25 years.” 
Read more: Employees are trusting AI with sensitive workplace informationHQ allows benefit leaders to instantly compare how benefit changes affect costs by generating data analyses and making suggestions based on usage. It also keeps all benefits documents in one searchable place and helps with compliance by flagging errors and tracking deadlines to avoid costly mistakes. These capabilities make for a much more efficient process for the whole benefits team, says Weber. 
“There is much work being done to build and design health plans, like going through renewal, quoting alternatives, evaluating different funding arrangements, looking at different vendors — and later, teams have to make sure that it’s all actually functioning appropriately,” Weber says. “We can short circuit a lot of that work and enable them to make much better decisions in less time.”
By taking these tasks over, HQ enables benefit leaders and their brokers to focus on the more employee-centric parts of the benefit administration process, such as creating more education material, answering workers’ questions and finding solutions that improve their experience.
Despite persistent anxiety that this type of AI technology will result in job loss, Weber argues the opposite. Leveraging tech is one of the only ways to ensure that everyone — brokers, leaders and employees — receive the adequate support they need to be successful in their roles and remain competitive long-term.   
Read more: This AI-powered platform wants to overhaul your performance review process“The pressure on the system and the industry to change right now is the highest it’s ever been,” Weber says. “Technology enables teams to be more proactive, present, relationship-oriented and strategic with our clients, because they’re not spending hours looking for an answer they could otherwise have in minutes.” 
As the integration of AI in the workforce continues to progress, Weber urges the benefit industry to be proactive when it comes to AI and begin investing in smarter solutions as soon as possible. 
“This work is getting more complex and the decisions these leaders make are getting more consequential,” Weber says. “If you don’t have AI and software helping you streamline work and get to decisions much faster, you’re just going to be stuck.”
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