Transforming Benefits with AI: From Confusion to Clarity with Rohan D’Souza, Co-Founder & CEO of Avante

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome back to Friends with Employee Benefits. Today we're diving deep into the intersection of cutting edge technology and the increasingly complex world of employee benefits to help find a solution towards healthier employees. As we've been doing all season. I'm thrilled to be joined by Rohan, who brings 18 years of experience in enterprise software, coming from both the provider and the payer side, to solving the challenge of navigating healthcare complexity. Rohan d' Souza is the co founder and CEO behind Avante, a native AI platform that manages the second largest corporate expense employee benefits. While delivering a personalized, engaging experience from hire to retire. Rohan helps break down the role AI has to play in helping make benefits more approachable, while simultaneously helping HR teams become more strategic. It's a really great discussion about harnessing the power of technology for good. So let's jump into the conversation. All right, Rohan, please just, just take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about yourself and, and also, what is Avante?

Speaker A: Yeah, Jeff, a little bit about myself. 18 years in enterprise software, coming from the provider side and the payer side, I saw the challenges that existed on the inside of health care. And now for the last couple of years, I've been solving it on the other side, which is the demand side and how people navigate the complexity of the system. Um, what Avante is, is Avante is a native AI solution that is focused on providing employers with great visibility into their plan design while helping employees navigate the complexity of that plan design. We do this through two AI. Uh, we've created two AI agents or personification of AI, Carly and Ava. Um, Carly is employee facing and Carly shows up wherever the employee works, whether it's Slack Teams, Workday, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, it doesn't matter where you are. Carly's there for you to answer all of your questions. Carly knows who you are, where you work, and all of the inputs to help inform your decision making. And what's really exciting about what Avante's building is, we've built the other side, which is providing deep visibility through AVA to the employer sponsor to know exactly what, what are people asking, why are they asking it, and what is it actually doing for their benefits design? So think you no longer have to go to dashboards to look at this information. You can just ask Ava questions like, hey, can you tell me how many people asked questions over the last week? And off those, what percentage of them are actually leveraging our, uh, direct primary care benefit? So now you have this one place where AVA can look across over all utilization data that's occurring in your system along with what's important for your employees.

Speaker B: Awesome. You know, it's funny, you know, even I think just a couple years ago you would say AI and probably, you know, a good portion of the population would scratch their head a bit and have to think about, well, what does AI mean again? Now you don't have to explain that anymore, right?

Speaker A: Well, I think you have to explain it in a little bit of a different way. Um, you know, so the. There's definitely a lot more maturity in the market. Uh, people understand it. I mean, everyone today is using ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or Claude in so many interesting ways. And sure, two years ago, most folks were like, what is this thing? And should I trust it? Um, the questions now being asked on how I as an entrepreneur have to explain it is a little bit more around, you know, this is very, very safe to use with the right guardrails in place. It's here to assist you, not to replace you. And so the way we're explaining AI and its concepts are a little bit different. I don't think we're 100% yet away from just not having to explain it at all.

Speaker B: Yeah, yep. Most people at least know what the acronym stands for now, though. Right. So, but, but from your perspective as a CEO, what are some of the biggest challenges your leadership team faces, do you think, when it comes to managing your employee benefit, your own employee benefits program, which when I say that I'm being inclusive of all the employee benefits programs in place, uh, including 401k and everything else, PTO. So, you know, what are the challenges your team is facing there in terms of managing your whole benefit package for your employees? Yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you for this question. I mean, one of the amazing things about working on a technology to help people understand it is we get to use it ourselves. Every day. We use it for new employees that onboard, uh, they're introduced to Carly, which is our AI. Um, and you know, we're very fortunate in that we have some incredibly smart, driven, motivated, uh, people that come from deep domain expertise. But when you're presented with questions around, hey, can I go see this dermatologist? Um, and I need to understand the concepts of in network and out of network. All of a sudden we're all on the same playing field, which is none of us understand it right. So, um, I think the things that we're dealing with is with a limited number of resources, how can we deliver an incredible experience for our own employees to navigate a system that's Pretty complex, right? Knowing what will drive the best outcomes for our team, uh, while thinking about cost strategies, while balancing people's unique needs are very much top of mind for us. Uh, we care deeply about offering an incredible benefits package to our team members that come to an early stage startup, uh, so that they don't have to think about, uh, the things that will hold them back from delivering their best selves. So think, you know, stuff like repetitive questions that you end up asking, uh, an HR at a benefits team. You know, like for, for a long time as an entrepreneur, I was the HR person, uh, myself. So I was helping me sound like a really qualified benefits expert, when in reality I myself don't come from the background. Right. So it's, uh, really remarkable to see.

Speaker B: Well, is that where you came up with the idea for Avante? That you were kind of sitting in that seat and you were fielding all those questions and you realized how did you come up with the idea for Avante? I shouldn't assume.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, like, so, um, I feel like the idea was that was a perfect alignment of a whole bunch of things that happen in the solar system. Um, as I had mentioned earlier, I've spent a bunch of time on trying to solve the problem with health care from m within the system being, um, on the inside of provider and payer organizations. And I've just learned for so long that the complexity, there's obviously a lot of complexity in the system and so much of it is really dependent on the consumer. And as I was spending more time thinking about the consumer angle, I started to get really deep on the role that employers spend and the responsibility sort of bestowed on employers to help bring the system in equilibrium. And then I got even more deeper into the concept of level funding and self funding and all of these incredible programs that HR and benefits leaders spend time putting together with incredible, uh, brokers and consultants like yourself, that I was like, hey, there's got to be a way that we can solve the problems that we have in the health care ecosystem from the quote unquote outside, right, which is through the consumer angle via the employer. And so that's where we really got the idea and started to pull on that a little bit more and peel the proverbial onion and realize that there is some commonality, uh, but there's a lot of, uh, variability. And what a great way to solve for variability, uh, with this AI revolution that we're going through.

Speaker B: This is what's great about technology. It's being able to tackle big, complex situations like These and not limiting ourselves in the way we can solve the problem. But what I hear often from employers and from their employees actually is, and this includes us who are in this business as well, that we're confused. Employees are confused about the benefits that are in place, how to best utilize the benefits, et cetera. So that begs the question, Rohan, why do you think employees are so confused? Why do they have a hard time fully understanding the benefits they have at hand and then how to navigate them effectively?

Speaker A: I don't think the system, Jeff, is actually incentivized to help remove the friction. And that's the problem. Right. So I think, uh, when you think about the core of what defines a benefits package or understanding the system, it's written by lawyers, not for consumers. Right? It's written to protect, um, things like lawsuits around, hey, you gave misinformation and false information. But you and I, as human beings don't think that way, right? For us, we think about, hey, I just want to ask a very simple question on, you know, um, is this particular program that my employer offering real a scam and what's the catch? Uh, no content document is written to answer it that way natively. Right. So I don't think the system's actually set up to, to allow for it to be this friction free and frictionless environment. And second, um, HR at the end of the day is a cost center. Right. So for most organizations, even though it's the second largest line item on the income statement after labor, it's still a cost center that is supporting the main thing that the company is doing. Right. If you're a locomotive company, you're supporting the team that is building really great locomotives versus putting more investment into the cost center to help answer questions around, hey, when is my ID card gonna show up? Um, and so it's like this perfect. You know, the system's not incentivized well, and there's cost pressures for CFOs to deliver against the pressures that either the market or their board is demanding.

Speaker B: Well, you know, on that point, one major item that is top of mind for almost all employers right now is cost and how to control the total cost of doing business, including, of course, healthcare expenses, which, as you know, uh, they're on an unsustainable trajectory. So, you know, we're seeing possibly the worst renewals that we've seen in 15, maybe even 20 years, and that is not sustainable. So how does Avante help with improving benefit utilization and how does that translate to savings or cost containment for employers?

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for that question and sorry y' all are facing that and uh, it's definitely a tough market out there. Um, what you just shared about the largest you know, rates that you've seen in the last 15 or 20 years is something I've been consistently hearing. Um, and look, I don't think we're the solve for everything Jeff, but um, we're, I think we will play a very big part uh, in helping smooth out the experience but also providing a greater amount of visibility. Let's talk about visibility for a second.

Speaker B: Benefits.

Speaker A: Um, design has a ton of really good thinking uh, and uh, data that helped inform that package. The problem is that almost every single one of your employees don't understand what went in into creating that. And so I think the role that we play is help people understand why their employer is offering these types of different plans or options. Take reference based pricing as an example, uh, or stop loss. What does all of this mean to an employee in a way that they can understand? And I think that AI and um, especially the work that we're doing is going to provide a tremendous amount of relief for employers and their employees to finally understand the system which has been really really hard. And I think that has a cost component attached to it like immediate cost is just helping infinitely scale a subject matter expert inside of the organization. Right. Every one of us have had this situation where you're about to have a baby and you're not going to read the 17 pages that your HR ah team has read. You're likely going to go find a friend in the company that has been through that experience before. Well now you can have a friend that's going to be non judgmental, be available to you when you're, you know, when the couple are sitting at home and discussing what are we going to do about leave to you have an AI that you can now talk to that's going to release a lot of the stress on these HR teams which essentially results in infinite scale, which means cost. So that's purely operational. Another way to think about it is these um, actuarial values and trends that you're looking at where there's a tremendous amount of growth expected on the health plan for the next year. There are programs put in place today to help release some of that cost. Right? Take for example a virtual MSK program or a virtual diabetes care navigation program. Almost every employer today has some of that capability in their plan design while 99% of employees don't know that. And so in our head we think I got to Go to the doctor that's five blocks away from me. The reality is you might be able to get to the care provider 5 seconds m away from you on a virtual experience. And by the way it's free. You don't even have to, you don't even have to pay for it because your employer has put that uh, capability in the design of the plan and AI is just going to help you get to the right place at the right time in the right moment. So it's sort of counter to think we can actually improve the utilization of benefits which will reduce the total cost of the benefit plan. Right? Because if you use your eap, you use your MSK program, you use your telemedicine providers, your direct primary care, you, even if you're in a high deductible health plan, especially if you're getting HSA money coming in, you will have an impact on the total cost of the plan going out into the future.

Speaker B: Sure, you're helping people get to lower cost but better outcome solutions that they otherwise wouldn't find because it is so confusing and there is so much out there and they don't know everything that's in their employee handbook or their benefit guy. That's right. By the way, you referenced a couple of things. Reference uh, based pricing and Stop Loss and any, any business leaders or ah, HR leaders listening who, who, who want to know more about those types of things. Uh, don't, don't hesitate to reach out to your local one digital team because we can explain that for you. So uh, because those are acronyms Rohan. Right. Industry specific acronyms or terms. And isn't that part of the problem is that you know you could use AI to kind of put everything in layperson's terms to, to make the, all this, this, this legalese and this insurance language more understandable for the average person. Right?

Speaker A: That's right. Approachable, not intimidating. I mean this, the system today is extremely intimidating for most of us. Right. Um, the, the, you know I read a stat somewhere that said 91% of Americans don't know the four most common terms that are used typically in health plan design. Right. Copay, co, insurance, out of pocket, max and deductible. Um, and people like you and I, like I have now become an expert in this because I'm looking at so many different SBDs and SBCs and benefits guides to help inform that. But 91% of us don't and so we're intimidated by it. It's like well think about an eob, right? The thing Shows up in the mail and right at the top it says this is not a bill. Well, what is it? Why did you send it to me? And so we help remove a lot of that friction and concern. And now you don't have to necessarily, uh, come off as, you know, feeling nervous about looking silly or dumb by asking a dumb question. AI is totally non judgmental. Ask me whatever question you want and I'll help explain it for you.

Speaker B: That is so true. And I'm really glad that you brought up explanation of benefits or EOBs as an example because really the healthcare and insurance industry as a whole makes it harder than it needs to be. Sometimes we over engineer and overcomplicate. So you know, removing that awkwardness or shyness, someone might feel, might feel to speak up and ask for clarification by giving them really a safe space through Carly that they can do that is so, is so great. And I want to switch gears here. It's a perfect time to switch gears and dive into roi. Return on investment. Something every business and people leader has to think about when considering investing in a new technology for their teams. How do you measure the power of AI powered benefits guidance for an organization?

Speaker A: Yeah, our math equation on this is pretty simple. There's two variables. Um, X plus Y equals Z. The X on us for us is immediate. I talked about this a little bit earlier. Infinite scale for the HR operations. So you're in the business of supporting your labor force to deliver the core thing that you are doing. You might be a chain of grocery stores to building rockets that go to unexplored places. At the end of the day your company is in the business of doing that. And HR's role is to support um, the talent to deliver that really, really well. And as part of it, there's a cost center that I talked about which supports this team. And AI presents an amazing opportunity to scale the future of that organization rather than the immed reduction of that organization. Right. There's concerns about AI being oh, it's coming for my job. And I tell people this all the time, you are not going to get replaced by AI. You will get replaced by the people who have learned how to use AI really, really well. That is the reality. Right. So the X on this is just cost containment of the cost center. Help a company grow and achieve their targets without spending as much to achieve that. In a world where AI didn't exist, the why is the really big long pole in the tent, right? Which is can we actually bend the cost down or can we Bring it to some sort of equilibrium or if the actual value said, we think this is going to be at, uh, 75 million next year through appropriate nudging and recommendation. And first starting off by providing visibility to plan sponsors around. Here's how your plan is performing. You're actually better off, uh, telling people and spending some time telling people that you have a direct primary care benefit available in your design. Start to go there. You will start to see an inflection point where this trend will start to bend down. But it has to come from a commitment, uh, from M, you know, from leadership within the organization. Right. So that's the X plus Y. I

Speaker B: would think the Y is perhaps the hardest part of the equation to quantify. Am I right in that?

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. I mean, it always has been. And look, I'm fully aware of the, the fact that there's been many, many vendors in the digital health space and the digital benefits space that have promised amazing returns. We take a much more conservative approach and say, like, look, if you're, you're going to see the results happen right in front of you because you will see utilization change, you will see the types of questions coming in. And so this isn't much of a, like, hey, we're betting on this thing and we'll see a result in 18 months. You'll know in the first three to six months if it's actually driving change for you.

Speaker B: Yeah. You could also just ask the HR team how much time you've saved them, uh, and they'll, uh, tell you, that's right. Maybe unrelated to roi, what's the most surprising insight you've uncovered about employee benefits usage since starting Avante?

Speaker A: My biggest surprise, um, and it has been for the last eight months, call it, um, you know, back to your ROI question. Every technology investment, uh, your procurement team or your finance team is going to ask you, okay, what's the, the dollar investment that we're making? What is it actually going to result in? HR presents a very interesting soft ROI opportunity because they're really in the business of both delivering, um, a program at scale, not compromising on employee experience. So there's something to say about satisfaction and experience and how committed people are to the company. Right. And so that the hard ROI is in this time savings thing that I talked about and we will typically get compared to, I was receiving, call it 100 tickets on an average weekly basis that comes in into my HR inbox and it roughly takes me about 20 to 30 minutes to respond to them. And by the way, I staff them like a normal 9 to 5 type role. There's a human being that has to go home and put dinner on the table and clean up the house or like, you know, do whatever they have to do, uh, and they'll come back the next day to a flooded inbox. And so we said, okay, your easiest thing to compare to is when we put an AI out, how much time is it saving? And so while we proved that there's a huge amount of time savings, the biggest surprise to me was the types of questions people will ask the AI are totally different than they were asking their HR team because now they can ask questions that they weren't previously comfortable asking your HR team. Right. For example, if I quit tomorrow, what will happen with my fsa? You're not going to ask your HR team that. The traffic that comes in where you get more real time information tends to be a little bit different. And it's creating this sense of, um, satisfaction for the HR leader that took a bet on putting the solution in by saying, these are the questions that people have actually been wanting to ask to help make informed decisions, but have not been able to do it because the only way they could get their answers was to open a ticket. And a ticket is fully identifiable. Right. And so we're, we're, today's our first day of like the OE season kickoff. You know, it's Monday, October 20th here. Uh, and so there'll be some really interesting patterns that will emerge that we can't wait to share with the group around all the traffic that, um, that's coming in. So that's the primary. The second is, um, we accidentally created an audit tool as part of standing up our AI solution. Uh, you know, AI accuracy is a big topic that people talk about and we put a very strong stance that said every response that our AI provides, we're going to provide you with grounded and factual justification, which means we will surface up a link to a document that is, that is providing you the source of where that AI answer was provided. And what ended up happening is you enter organizations that they're, that they are now when they go through that testing, they're like, oh, no, I didn't even know I had that document. Uh, because the AI is referencing it. So you might get an SPD that says something in a benefits guide that says something totally different. And it gives you this ability to catch these errors really soon before you have to go through an audit behind the scenes to clean up all of that information. Because a whole bunch of employees Sent in a really pissed off, you know, email to your HR team saying, like, hey, I went here and I went here, and the answers were different.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is frustrating. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Rohan, but, uh, your AI is not out there like a copilot or chatgpt and pulling information from God knows where you're getting it from. The documents for that specific benefit package or that specific benefit specifically from that group's plan documents, uh, which are the source of truth for how the plans are administered. Is that right?

Speaker A: That's exactly right. Which is why we're so dependent on, one, receiving those documents and two, those documents or content being high quality. And, you know, the. The source of the content could be PDFs or slides or FAQ documents. It could also just be. Point us to this intranet and the Internet has the information and we'll pull it down from there. Right. So we're always focused on giving the core source of truth.

Speaker B: You know, I wanted to make sure we reiterated that because I think it's such a huge advantage to your business model and how you're not just out there pulling from, from the World Wide Web and getting random information that's unchecked. Um, that, that, that clarification is super important. The accuracy of the data that you're pulling specific to that plan. Um, you know, I really do want to take a moment, though, and talk about the fact that, as you know, OneDigital is a client of Avante, and we leverage Carly internally at OneDigital for our own employees so that we can learn more about our benefits and ask the questions that are on our mind. Um, and I think that there's been some really great successes so far. Can you share a little bit about how things are going?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, um, we've been very fortunate to work with the OneDigital team for quite some time now. Um, y' all are a pretty large employer that's, you know, growing aggressively. Um, your team is doing wonderful things. And as part of it, you have the same problems that every employer has. Right. Even though you're in the business of educating and selling employee benefits, you know, disability coverage for, you know, financial wealth, performance, etc. Etc. Your internal HR team has the same challenges that most organizations do, which is how do we scale our team? Um, sort of elastically and benefits has seasonality in its business. Right. There's a huge spike that occurs around open enrollment, another big spike that occurs around the first, um, month of the year, and then in key life Events like mergers and acquisitions, et cetera, et cetera. So onedigital employees have the ability to talk to Carly. Uh, Carly is an AI that connects with um, all the core systems that exist inside of an organization. And Carly personalizes responses back to the employee. It knows who the employee is. It single signs on into the organization, it pulls in the feeds from the Ben admin and then it reads uh, across all of the content that sits inside of an organization like One Digital's core content repository guides, FAQs, PDF documents, 790 page SPD docs that nobody ever reads but the AI can now read. Um, and yeah, Carly does, Carly does a wonderful job. Wonderful uh, job at that.

Speaker B: I want to take our conversation into something that I personally hadn't heard of before and that something is called sentiment analysis. So how can understanding employee sentiment help organizations design better and smarter benefit strategies?

Speaker A: So another thing I forgot to mention on the accidental creation of AI is um, you almost have a pulse survey tool giving you real time information across the beating heart of your organization. And so um, I talked about how Carly is available for employees to get their questions answered. Uh, Carly then routes the question if it cannot answer the question to the right place, and the right place might be somebody within your internal organization or it could be external. Right. Your PBM is going to help you understand what is that letter that you just received. And behind all of this is your HR team and your benefits team have real time visibility into conversations that are occurring, not down to like hey, Jeff asked this question and Rohan asked this question. It's getting visibility into summarized de identified analysis to say a whole bunch of people are asking questions about our GLP1 coverage. And we want you to know that we, the AI wants you to know that there's this pattern emerging and as part of that the AI has the smartness in order to do a sentiment analysis and say what percentage of these people are actually asking it in a very upset, uh, or sort of neutral way. And it might be due to the fact that some of the content you have written about this topic is super hard to understand or it will cause a bigger problem. So we're ah, alerting about those things much sooner than if you were to do a benefit survey one time in a year. Right now you get visibility into this stuff happening almost in near real time. So think of it as being just this proactive tool rather than being reactive. That's typically happened um, in the employee benefits space through these uh, surveys that have occurred.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a running real time, 365 day a year survey versus to your point, one or two times a year, right?

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: Boy, the development in AI just seems like uh, every day it's just more advanced than the day before. And I wonder, you know, know, like what we saw earlier this month with the entrance of AI video generators and, and how that's causing mixed reviews and it kind of, kind of be a little scary in fact even. But uh, how do you see AI involving specifically in the benefit space over say the next five or ten years?

Speaker A: Rohan, AI is challenging us to think in months and not in years. Um, you know, the previously when we talked about technology re revolutions it was five to 10 years. So I would say like for us it's mostly like in the next 12 to 18 months. And so if I was to challenge your question a little bit, I'll say like, here's what I think is likely going to happen. First of all, AI is the worst that it will ever be today. And even today it feels like magic. And what it does today is 100x better than what we have been exposed to in previous technology revolutions. Right? Think an AI that understands all your benefits, documents and able to respond to you in 50 languages out of the box, you know, just based on content that was written in English. So that is like a magical experience you receive today. And it is the worst that it is ever going to be today. Tomorrow it is going to be better. Right? So what I think is going to happen is every one of us, um, and you know, we are obviously selfishly shooting for this in the form of what I call AI ubiquity. Every single one of us is going to have an expert available to us at any given time that deeply understands us, that we feel safe to talk to, that knows about our usage and patterns and will help predict our next moves to recommend the right thing at the right moment. Uh, and for in benefits, what that might mean is it knows that um, you know, uh, we're three months from having our first child and it will make recommendations on what you need to do depending on the state and the county you live in. Uh, it will give you your explaining on how much you can expect in the form of payroll and then it'll walk you through that whole process of like, congratulations on having a baby, here's what you need to do. And by the way, you work at this incredible company that gives you mental health support throughout the time that you are on maternity or paternity leave, right? So this smartness and in A very safe and personal, call it non judgmental way. I think that is what's going to exist on the employee side, on the employer side. Employers now are going to finally have this AI that understands the mission, the vision, the strategic goals of the organization and correlate that to what's actually happening around utilization. So if, for example, your CFO has set a target for spend or um, you know, margin performance for the next 24 to 36 months, the AI is going to just have the smartness to convert that into what does it mean for your business unit. Right. You as the global head of benefits or the chro for the organization. Here's what's happening. So to help you prepare for those meetings, both planned and unplanned, right? Unplanned stuff happens in the enterprise all the time. I had a chro, uh, the other day I was talking to that said I wanted to know if there was an increase in mental health utilization during the election season. And I said, how would you get the answer to that question before? It's like, well, I'd have to look through a whole bunch of spreadsheets, look at vendor reports, probably talk to my broker or consultant. Now I can just ask the AI. I can say, did we see an increase in mental health utilization during the election season? AI has the smartness to understand election season mental health utilization because plan design documents are there CPT codes against utilization. To give you that very quick answer and nothing more.

Speaker B: You know, the way you phrased the question reminded me that it is very conversational. Carly, you just asked the question as you would, as if you're talking to a friend. And it makes it so, so simple and it's just such an incredible tool. Um, you know, you kind of mentioned this already, that there's going to be some predictive value that AI is going to deliver, you know, anticipating our next questions and our needs. But for a lot of people, that can cause some skepticism and even fear. So what are the common misconceptions employers have about implementing AI and benefits management?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, I've said this before and I'll keep on saying it until somebody tells me, Rohan, you should stop saying it. Everyone, everyone gets the point now, which is the concept of the FOMO versus fomo. You know, I talk a lot about, talk to HR leaders. And um, one of them, who I've gotten pretty close with because we've worked so long, uh, is like I held on to my BlackBerry for way too long. I kept telling myself like, oh, this iPhone thing is not going to work, the BlackBerry is going to be the thing. And she's like, I never want to experience that again. So there's clearly some FOMO with AI, right? But, uh, the one unfortunate thing with all of this amazing AI investment that's occurring and AI tooling is there's a lot of bad AI that's out there. And so there's skepticism, which means there's the fear of messing up, which is the FOMO component. And I think that that is legitimate. There should be some fear, fear, less fear on the AI that's going to go completely rogue and take all your data and sell it. More fear on the quality of the responses and earning the user trust. And so I tell people, and in benefits, this is like pretty high stakes because if you give a wrong answer, you know, got, uh, like, worst case, it could end up in a lawsuit because you said like, hey, you told me to go here and I went here and I had a terrible experience. In most cases, it's a disgruntled or dissatisfied employee that today with social media is going to make a big stink about it. So you want to avoid those things from happening. What we tell people always is to overcome the skepticism. Every organization, no matter how innovative you are, one, you have to have a strategy, and two, your strategy likely is a crawl, walk, run. You have to experiment. You have to create the space for experimentation. Um, I will say that AI experimentation is hard because most of the customization happens in the last mile, not in the first mile. And so the best way to do your experimentation is figure out a workflow where you could be the approver of the responses. Uh, in benefits, a great place to start is your ticketing system or your email inbox. AI will generate all of the responses for you in draft form. You overcome the skepticism based on the number of drafts you approve immediately. Your FOMO is now being reduced to saying, I need to get this in the hands of as many people as fast as possible. Never approach the jumping, um, in the deep end. And then the last thing I'll say is the AI implementations that have gone poorly are the ones that are applied for the things that are the most complex for humans to solve. No, you need AI to relieve you or provide you the gift of time to do the things that we as humans are really, really good at, which is emotion, empathy, the things that we're being prevented from doing those tasks because it's the mundane, rote, routine stuff that, that is, we're being held back from or back by to do. Right. I should Solve that so that you can go tackle the much more harder problems that we're just supposed to be doing.

Speaker B: Rohan, I think I heard you say that you're, you're not totally unconcerned, but less concerned about the data privacy and security question or concern that a lot of employers have. So did I hear you right on that?

Speaker A: Yeah, Jeff, maybe, you know, let me, let me be a little bit more clear. Look, privacy is still a really, really important thing. I think what's happened is the market has just gotten mature to the point that one, all the, all the software companies that did not put an emphasis on data privacy and security in the early days of their build have all been sort of like washed away. Right. You've not been able to survive the procurement and the IT purchasing process. And today ourselves, including a couple of our competitors, have made their investment in educating their market and their customer about the things that they're doing around SOC 2 compliance, HIPAA compliance, ERISA protections, real time logging and telemetry, that it isn't just the most important thing that our customers are asking for.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is a great point. Hey, you know, if you, if you could change one thing about the way benefits are managed across all industries today, what would that be?

Speaker A: I, um, would say, you know, the, the lightning strike that is open enrollment should be a consistent, beautiful thunderstorm that occurs throughout the year. Um, I sleep with the thunderstorm. White noise. Uh, thanks for going through the process of having, uh, kids and trying to keep them quiet. And Benefits is sort of like that. Right. Like today we put way too much effort, and rightfully we put a lot of effort behind oe. But benefits is a consistent journey that occurs from the point of, you know, the hire to retire. Right. And I think AI, AI can be a solve for this. But I would, I would convince, I would work to convince HR leaders and the teams that support them to really think beyond the concept of just open enrollment. Um, because there's stuff happening throughout the year that AI can be very, very helpful and useful. Um, the other is being just more proactive on the signals that you're capturing. Right. Today we're making decisions pretty late. Um, take claims as an example. It's a 90 day adjudication process. Um, and by the time that, by the time you get signals into your plan design, in some cases it's already too late. You know, the 17 or, you know, the seven NICU baby cases already happened. How do you, how do you get much more proactive on that and recommend during the, again, this concept of hire to retire early on, so being more proactive with your feedback loop. Um, and third is, um, I think HR's moment to shine has now arrived. Uh, historically, when you think about big change management processes that have occurred inside of an organization, when technology has come in to try to either remove cost or enhance revenue, it's always been someone other than hr. And so I think what I would change is this perception that innovation actually happens within human resources and AI is like the perfect place for it because you're upskilling and reskilling. It's literally HR's remit or charter to do. Right.

Speaker B: That's a different way to think about it. Uh, you mentioned earlier that maybe there are some HR professionals who feel their job is threatened by AI, and yet you're saying it's actually going to help you shine and thrive and, and take your rightful role as a strategic partner within the organization. And that's such a fantastic thing, uh, for HR professionals. Um, so what's next with Avante?

Speaker A: Oh, gosh, there's so much to do. You know, we're still very, very much in the very, very early innings for us. What's next for us is continue to keep building out the core of, uh, what we believe in. Number one, people don't want more apps. They want an AI to be with them everywhere, uh, that they work, that they communicate, uh, which means taking on a lot more system integrations, um, which have historically been the hard thing to do in enterprise software and enterprise technology. Uh, and I think we've done a good job at that and we'll continue to do better. Second is taking on tasks on behalf of the user. We're approaching this world of where AIs, ah, there's this term being thrown around a lot around agentic AI, which is essentially you're actually giving the AI the right to perform a particular task. Um, I won't be surprised next year in open enrollment or maybe early open enrollment, where BEN Admin Systems will allow you the capability to make changes just based on natural language. It's like, hey, I added, you know, had, um, a really successful birth delivery three days ago. I need to add my kiddo to my plan. Done. The BEN Admin system will take care of it. And so there's a lot more agentic processes that we're working on. Um, we're very excited about global expansion and global capability. Most of the teams we support and companies we support today are global enterprises. They might be headquartered here, um, but they're in the business of offering an Employee experience, equity, where everyone feels the same, uh, and there isn't specialization. Um, and so we think that those are going to be some interesting areas for us to expand into.

Speaker B: One last question, Rohan. What advice would you give to an HR leader who's looking to leverage AI more within their role as an HR leader?

Speaker A: Uh, first and most important one is talk to people in your group. Find the people in your peer group. There's a ton of these. Uh, OneDigital obviously has a bunch. I know you'll do an incredible job with regional meetings and inviting folks to roundtables. You are going to get the most amount of real world evidence from talking to people who might be a couple months ahead of you in the implementation of the solution. So look at your peer groups. Um, second is to really start to catalog your processes and build a very simple Excel scoring model where you write down the key tasks that your team is performing, put a little complexity score next to it and give it a T shirt sizing, say small, medium, large around complexity and then do another column to show you, ah, risk of something going wrong. Right again. Small, medium, large. And you have just created the best, uh, template for figuring out where to start. And if you are like most other HR leaders, you will likely come to the same sort of, you know, set of problems that everyone has. We're being inundated by the same types of questions. And the cost of misinformation is, especially with a human in a loop, is super low because someone is drafting it. Um, you know, uh, creating guides is another one. And so you'll end up finding the same list. And then it's just a matter of taking that leap. You know, strap the helmet on, you're already at the edge. You're on a perfectly, ah, tested, um, plane that is not going to come to a crash. It's going to give you this beautiful glide and all you need to do is just put the helmet on. Right? So that's what I tell, uh, HR leaders today. Um, because what a time to be alive, right? There's amazing technology, there's people done it before, and you have problems that this could apply to immediately before we wrap up.

Speaker B: Anything you think we missed or final thoughts before we uh, before we put a bow on this, Rohan?

Speaker A: Um, no, I think we captured everything. I will say, you know, talk about your story more. You know, one Digital had some really, really good results. You know, we gave. You gave, we gave the organization 40, almost 5000 inquiries that came in into the HR team were handled fully by AI. Um, with almost 1800 perfectly formed, beautiful email drafts that were created, uh, the gift of over 560 hours back, you all have a really, really good story to bring to market in arguably the most skeptical group. Uh, because you're in the business of selling benefits. Um, and so, yeah, there's tons of great stories out there. And, um, I'm just fortunate that, you know, we're able to talk about this today, and we're still in the very, very early stages.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a great conversation. So thank you again for being here, Rohan, but I do have a list of what we call rapid fire questions for you just so our listeners can get to know you a little bit better. Um, so first thing that comes to mind. You ready?

Speaker A: Go. Okay.

Speaker B: All right. So what was your very first job?

Speaker A: Scraping houses.

Speaker B: One thing you'd bring with you to a deserted island.

Speaker A: My iPhone.

Speaker B: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Speaker A: Antarctica.

Speaker B: What's something you could eat every day of your life and never get bored of?

Speaker A: My mom's chicken curry and white rice.

Speaker B: And finally, we at OneDigital are celebrating 25 years of what we call building for better, uh, Rohan, with our clients, uh, partners. Teams. What's one way you plan to build for better, uh, to end 2025 and head into 2026?

Speaker A: Being true to our commitment to our clients that we will always deliver really good AI with them co building with us because they understand their philosophy, their vision and their goals. And we're the enabler off that this cannot be done by us in a vacuum. So we have to build it better together.

Speaker B: All right, uh, thank you again for joining us. Appreciate your time, uh, this afternoon. And thanks to those tuning in, this has been another episode of Friends with employee benefits.

Speaker A: Sam.