For years, our industry has defined “innovation” as making benefits easier—a smoother enrollment flow, a cleaner user interface, a mobile-first experience, a friendlier chatbot, a more personalized recommendation. And while those improvements matter, the world of work has outgrown reactive systems that wait for employees to click, search, submit, or raise their hand before support begins.
Today’s employees expect experiences that make sense of their lives, before they even know what to ask. We see this already in so many of our day-to-day interactions, from what shows and movies to watch to where to invest our money to the fastest way to our destination.
This expectation isn’t a luxury—it’s table stakes. So why is the benefits industry still stuck in reaction mode? Healthcare and benefits are certainly more complex than our social media feeds and navigation apps, but that doesn’t mean we need to stick with it.
We have the tech, expertise, and data to make this happen. And we’re leading the shift from reaction to anticipation.
Employees have been telling us for nearly a decade that they want more: More help choosing the right benefits, more help understanding their options, more help managing their total wellbeing.
Personalization has helped our industry grow, but it’s inherently reactive and assumptive. It waits for signals that come after an employee is experiencing stress, frustration, or—worse—a health event.
We’ve said this for a while: Employees will never be benefits experts and they shouldn’t have to be. The shift from personalization to anticipation is both a category shift for our industry and empathy in action.
Personalization assumes people understand the system well enough to know which button to press or what to search for. But as our CEO recently shared, real life rarely presents itself that cleanly:
These are not search terms. They’re moments of stress, confusion, and vulnerability. People don’t want to wait for or wonder what’s next, when help will step in, or what they’re supposed to do. They want answers and they want them before they need them.
At the center of anticipatory benefits is SofiaSM, Businessolver’s proprietary intelligence layer.
Sofia is embedded across our technology and service operations, translating insight into early action across the entire benefits ecosystem.
Unlike out-of-the-box AI tools that rely on scripted responses, Sofia learns from years of behavioral patterns, life event triggers, communication signals, case interactions, sentiment cues, and environmental and financial indicators. She can recognize when someone is:
This is what readiness looks like: support that shows up before the cost, before the claim, before the crisis.
The organizations that will win the next decade of work are the ones that can support people holistically—physically, financially, and emotionally—while reducing friction and uncertainty. Anticipation enables that by transforming benefits from a cost center into performance infrastructure.
It delivers:
At its core, anticipation isn’t just about data. It’s about people.
It’s what happens when intelligence recognizes a need before it becomes a setback. It’s how employees feel supported without having to ask. It’s how HR leaders finally get the breathing room and foresight they deserve.
Anticipation isn’t replacing human empathy—it’s scaling it. And by weaving it into the fabric of benefits administration, we’re building a future where people feel seen, supported, and empowered.
Because when people thrive, business grows.
And the era of thriving begins with anticipation.
