Experts see AI boosting productivity across workplace benefits

• Key Insight: Learn how AI integration is transforming employee benefits engagement and delivery.  
• What's at Stake: Failure to scale AI risks inconsistent benefits experiences and lost productivity gains.  
• Forward Look: Prepare for evolving agent deployments as organizations seek scalable, trustworthy AI.
• Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

AI is here to stay and companies can utilize it to offer a more engaging workplace benefits experience for employees. 
A panel of three experts discussed this trend and more during a discussion on Dec. 11 titled "Putting AI to Work: The Opportunities and Risks of AI in Workplace Benefits." The discussion was held as part of the Employee Benefit Research Institute's 2025 Financial Wellbeing Symposium.

AI is a perfect tool for the benefits industry and can lead to huge increases in productivity, said Edwin Jongsma, vice president of AI and integrations at Financial Finesse, a financial wellness think tank.

"I'm an engineer, and we build platforms," Jongsma said. "AI makes me more productive, but I still need to be there to guide what's happening." 

It's too early to predict how AI will evolve, but Jongsma believes humans will continue to work alongside the technology across different industries. 

"What I'm hearing from the AI engineers is that we are plateauing with the limits of what AI can do," Jongsma said. "We need a revolution. We need a new kind of AI. We really want to take the next step, and that might happen. 

"But for now, if we embrace it and make ourselves as individuals more productive …I think we're helping. We all want to help more employees, right?"

Read more: Concerned to confident: How this exec transformed AI use at her company

Greg Ward, director of Financial Finesse, presented data from the McKinsey 2025 AI Report, which found that 88% of companies are now using AI. However, 67% remain trapped in "pilot mode" and are unable to effectively scale across the entire company. 

Trust is the main bottleneck, with 51% of organizations reporting that AI deployments have backfired. According to the report, 62% of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, yet just 23% have successfully managed to scale them. 

"What's helpful for a lot of people is to actually see AI in action and to see what the user experience looks like," said Deirdre Bertrand, chief operating officer at Candidly, an AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform.

Candidly has an AI tool named Kate that is a certified student loan planner, and she can help users plan for college or figure out if they have access to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, among many other features. 

Bertrand said Kate's smart tools can help users save an average of $347 a month. "You can even ask Kate to set up a coaching call for personal support from a professional," Bertrand said. 

Kate can even sense when someone is in distress and would benefit from talking to a human.   

"Every single human coaching call gets fed into Kate to help improve her performance as well," Bertrand said. "I strongly believe that there's always going to be clients that want to have that human coaching element, but Kate is very good at dealing with tier-one and tier-two issues, where a user may not want to pick up the phone and call a coach."

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The panel was also asked whether they were concerned about AI bias in workplace benefits. Jongsma said programs can be trained in order to contain biases and hallucinations, "which are especially dangerous for financial wellness and education." 

Bertrand said Candidly conducts extensive bias testing, and so far the results have been positive.

"I think what was most interesting is one of the attributes we used was financial literacy," she said. "We made our personas three degrees of financially literate. The one result we found is that the group with the weakest amount of financial literacy had the longest conversations with the most tools employed, which for us is a really positive result."