Last edition, we announced anticipation as the new era of benefits. Anticipation is the natural shift for our industry to elevate HR back into their strategic roles and make it easier for employees to get the right support at the right time.
It’s also an evolution of how empathy shows up in our technology and our work.
“Change is only hard for the unready.” – Cy Wakeman
A lot is changing: How we work, how AI integrates into our workplaces, how we expect technology to work for us.
Sitting in the status quo doesn’t work. So we ignited a shift to address head-on what we’re hearing from clients, partners, analysts, the media, and you.
Anticipation enables everyone to step in ahead of time, to shift how we work and collaborate, and transform what technology can (and should) be doing for us. Our partners at Benifex are also thinking about this and outlining how forward-thinking HR teams can lean in in their latest data study.
But anticipation is only as effective as it is empathetic. Because to understand what’s coming up, you have to understand where we’re coming from and where we are in the now.
Read more: Lisa Williams at Boardsi highlights why executive empathy is the most valuable leadership skill
Without over anthropomorphizing it—yes, technology can be empathetic.
We’re not just talking about kind copy or timely reminders, though those are important too. Empathy in technology shows up in how the platforms use data. Sentiment analysis, behavioral analytics, trend spotting—all of it feeds into building a more empathetic model for insights that account for risk, confusion, and delight.
For example, our newest Pinnacle Partner, Counsel, helps address this with proactive virtual care. By intelligently triaging employees’ health needs from the first interaction, Counsel resolves employees’ concerns, reducing avoidable in-person care and downstream claims costs.
Timely. Contextual. Insightful. That’s empathy in action with anticipatory insights.
Get our VP of strategy’s perspective: Katie Carroll unpacks what the shift to anticipatory insights looks like on EBN with Paola Peralta
Anticipation isn’t something that happens in isolation—or inside a single line of code. It happens when people, partners, and platforms share a common language and a common goal: Creating a benefits technology experience that works better for everyone.
By integrating data signals across our technology and partners, elevating the expertise of HR leaders, and bringing our clients into earlier phases of innovation cycles, we’re building solutions shaped not just for the market but with the market.
This shift is already influencing how we address organizational risk, improve employee decisionmaking, and create more confident outcomes across the benefits journey. Anticipatory insights only work when the insights are connected—across systems, across stakeholders, and across moments that matter.
Hear it from our CEO: Jon Shanahan talks about what the next generation of corporate risk looks like in Inc.
to collaborate across the entire benefits ecosystem. Because when technology anticipates and people connect, we create not just better outcomes—but a better way of working.
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