Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help embed healthcare and protection offerings with smaller employers.
One of the hot news topics of recent months has been the arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the British workplace, with a consistent subtext that AI will result in massive job losses across many sectors of the economy.
Yet such negative reporting often overlooks the reality that AI has been developed to help and not hinder. Just like any other tool ever invented, AI will help humanity do things better and faster, allowing us to collectively move on to the next challenge.
This rather more positive perception of AI is particularly relevant in the world of healthcare, protection, and employee wellbeing.
Why?
At the very core of our industry is a reliance on quality data to assess risk, price premiums, and provide the best possible outcomes to employers and employees alike. Artificial Intelligence can and will help with assessing such data.
Indeed, many AI improvements to our collective offerings are already taking place.
On the diagnostic side of the industry, we are already witnessing the birth of technological solutions that will enable workers to assess potential health risks rapidly and accurately without the delays of a trip to a healthcare professional.
Just as importantly Artificial Intelligence provides the opportunity to open entirely new data seams to help our industry provide ever-better results. Personalised wellbeing apps are now commonplace, and over time these will quietly, anonymously, and unobtrusively gather reams of useful new data from employee phones and devices which the industry can harness to improve our offerings further.
A new audience?
So where might this new tranche of data make a real difference?
The obvious answer is that more data might enable the employee benefits industry to embed benefits and best practice in organisations with low levels of employee headcount.
Most readers of this article would accept that larger employers often have a more comprehensive wellbeing and benefits proposition than their smaller industry cousins. Often this simply reflects the much greater scale, resources, and finances of those large employers.
Incidence
Yet other crucial factors separate large and small employers when considering employee benefits, and often a key problem is the acceptance of wellbeing risk within SMEs.
A large employer, say one with 20,000 employees, is likely to experience multiple employee absences through physical, mental, or financial health issues each and every month. This familiarity with the challenges of poor health – not to mention its impact in increased absence and reduced productivity – makes the business case for health and protection interventions far easier to make.
The same cannot be said for an employer of just 20 workers. Whilst the health risks are essentially the same, it is quite possible that such an organisation might not experience a serious employee illness or lengthy absence for many, many years. It follows that the employer often fails to recognise the risk to their workforce or their bottom line until after such a condition sadly arises.
Impact
Yet the irony is that a smaller organisation is likely to feel the impact of even just one absence far more acutely than a larger employer.
Large employers are often able to reallocate the absent employee’s workload across multiple colleagues, and many such organisations will also have rapid access to external locums or temporary workers to bridge any additional gap if needed.
Whereas a smaller employer rarely has the same luxury of human or fiscal capital and therefore faces a real problem if an employee becomes long-term ill. In short, the impact of just one absence on a small team can be far greater than several at a larger employer.
Tangible data
This is where I believe AI can genuinely make a difference.
If the data collected by wellbeing apps can be consolidated by both sector and size of workforce, then a truly meaningful business case for small employers in so many different industries and specialisms can be built. Not only that, but AI may then provide the means to interrogate those data sets and suggest appropriate responses that mere humans might otherwise overlook.
The result should be big data and ideas that exclude the bias of large workforces and are therefore focused on the risks and responses available to SMEs in any given sector.
If the industry can work towards this goal quickly, then the need for future government intervention in the protection and wellbeing space will be much reduced, allowing us to continue to evolve our offering in the interests of our corporate clients, their employees, their dependents, and yes, the industry itself.
AI can – and should be – a positive step for the industry. Let us stop fearing the future and choose to embrace it instead.
