Businessolver Announces Key Technology Innovation to Expand AI to Drive Greater Service 

HR technology leader continues to innovate machine-learning personalization technology including ChatGPT to drive enhanced employee benefits experience and self-service. 

WEST DES MOINES, IOWA, May 16, 2023—Businessolver®, a leading SaaS-based benefits technology platform today announced their 2023 product strategy which includes expanding its overall AI capabilities beyond their traditional virtual benefits assistant Sofia^SM and delivering that intelligent experience throughout the employee’s entire interaction with their benefits. Additionally, Businessolver is first to market in the benefits technology industry to leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo service to their existing and proprietary Natural Language Understanding (NLU) framework, all to greatly improve the service delivered through their benefits platform, Benefitsolver™. 

“As the market leader in benefits industry innovation, this strategic move empowers our clients to tackle today’s benefits engagement challenges,” said Rae Shanahan, Businessolver’s Chief Strategy Officer. “Our advanced, intuitive technology bolsters employee engagement and self-service, while providing our Businessolver team with smarter tools that deliver superior outcomes in overall service. This is a pivotal step in our platform’s evolution that demonstrates our commitment to Tech with Heart.” 

Sofia, Businessolver’s AI benefits assistant technology, was implemented within Benefitsolver in 2017 to support employee self-service via in-platform chat, mobile, and phone call using natural language and large language models.  

Industry-first Benefitsolver enhancements integrate ChatGPT into Sofia and existing platform capabilities. 

Businessolver will enhance existing proprietary AI and language models with the addition of ChatGPT to expand Sofia’s and Benefitsolver’s in-platform capabilities, personalizing the end-to-end benefits experience for each user based on their unique needs and behaviors.  

Businessolver is leveraging Microsoft’s HIPAA-compliant Azure OpenAI service to improve Sofia’s current NLU capabilities. This integration involves pre-processing member’s questions to identify actions and sentiment, resulting in a faster and more accurate response to employee benefits-related questions. Additionally, it improves Sofia’s ability to manage more complex questions by summarizing the true intention and sentiment of an employee’s need while still employing Businessolver’s proprietary AI models to understand the context of a question within the employee benefits domain. Their proprietary models are built on 25 years of benefits chat and transcription data. 

“This is very exciting for us at Businessolver as we know that ChatGPT has the ability to refine and improve our overall AI framework, while still leveraging the core components of our proprietary AI technology that we have been investing in for the last six years,” said Shanahan.  

The evolution of AI across the benefits platform and technology 

In addition to the exciting enhancements with ChatGPT, Businessolver also announced its ability to infuse Sofia’s AI services throughout the entire employee experience. They have expanded Sofia’s AI abilities beyond the chat and call functions and infused those services through the entire platform to dynamically serve up targeted, personalized, and relevant benefits information throughout each employee touchpoint, similar to other consumer technology experiences. “We take what we know about each individual and predict how to best serve them content as well as reorder menu options that are most applicable to their stage of life or unique situation,” said Shanahan. “We do all of this to remove the burden of understanding benefits from the employee themselves and instead place that burden on the technology that was built to serve them.” 

The dynamic nature of serving content and data to the employee has also been expanded to Businessolver’s Service Center as well. Businessolver has enhanced their call center phone experience with a personalized, dynamic interactive voice response (IVR) menu that will change based on individual employees’ information and behaviors just as is being done through self-service in the Benefitsolver platform. 

Today, Sofia and Businessolver’s service-related technologies help: 

• Drive 80% of all impressions for point solutions in member chat sessions 
• Influence an 18% engagement rate (click or call) through Sofia impressions 
• Support employee self-service with an average 90% same-day resolution rate through Sofia chat and a 29% resolution rate over the phones (meaning the employee did not need to speak to a live advocate) 

Personalization is table stakes for employee benefits engagement and HR efficiency. 

According to Businessolver’s 2023 Benefits Insights report, 85% of employees are confused about their benefits, but AI-driven personalized support can improve end-to-end engagement with right-fit benefits year-round: 

• 60% of employees who used personalized decision support at enrollment elected a high-deductible health plan with an HSA, more than three times higher than employees who did not have personalized support available to them. 
• 70% of employees are willing to engage their claims data to further personalize their benefits experience. 

“Our product vision is to be a change agent within the healthcare landscape and that starts by supporting employees in their benefits engagement,” said Shanahan. “The work we are doing to bring greater intelligence to the experience in our technology and service will ensure that vision is realized.” 

Interested in learning more about these innovations? Join at Vision 2023 by registering at www.businessolver.com/vision. 

About Businessolver: 

Since 1998, Businessolver has delivered market-changing benefits technology and services supported by an intrinsic responsiveness to client needs. The company creates client programs that maximize benefits program investment, minimize risk exposure, and engage employees with easy-to-use solutions and communication tools to assist them in making wise and cost-efficient benefits selections. Founded by HR professionals, Businessolver’s unwavering service-oriented culture and secure SaaS platform provide measurable success in its mission to provide complete client delight. 

Media Contact: 

Bridget Mortland 
Head of Marketing and Product Solutions
[email protected]