May in Review: Raising the Bar on Benefits Guidance, ICHRA Infrastructure, and Agentic AI

Something shifted in May. Not in the way that a single headline shifts things, but in the quieter, more durable way that happens when multiple parts of a market move in the same direction at the same time.

The announcements this month were not just incremental product updates. They were signals — of an industry moving from experimentation to infrastructure, from AI pilots to AI operating systems, from ICHRA curiosity to ICHRA plumbing. And in the middle of all of it, a new coalition launched with a simple but urgent premise: the tools guiding employees through their benefits decisions need to be held to a higher standard.

Here is what I am watching, and why I think it matters.

1. AI Is Moving Off the Whiteboard

For the past year, the conversation around AI in benefits has largely been about navigation — helping employees find a doctor or understand a deductible. In May, the conversation got more serious.

A recent survey by Willis Towers Watson found that only 20% of employers currently operationalize AI in their benefits programs, but 72% plan to embed it within the next two years. The gap between ambition and execution is real — 71% of benefit teams say they lack the internal resources to actually do it.

What is interesting is how the market is responding. HealthJoy announced its evolution into a full benefits operating system, using AI trained on a decade of real member interactions to personalize plan recommendations. bswift introduced agentic AI into its enterprise implementation workflows — not as a demo feature, but to handle the genuinely complex, manual work of benefits configuration and EDI. And Arthur J. Gallagher announced they will now offer Avante, a dual-agent platform with one agent serving employees and another giving HR teams real-time visibility into cost and engagement data.

What this tells me is that the bar has moved. A chatbot is not a strategy anymore. The platforms that will matter are the ones using AI to rewire how benefits actually get administered — while keeping humans in the loop where the stakes are highest.

2. The Benefits Guidance Consortium: A New Standard for a Crowded Market

As AI adoption accelerates, so does a risk I have been thinking about for a while — employees turning to unvalidated public AI tools for sensitive health and financial decisions. The privacy implications alone are significant. The potential for bad guidance is even more so.

This month, I was incredibly proud to co-found and launch the Benefits Guidance Consortium (BGC) alongside Ben Yomtoob of BuckleyRoberts. The BGC brings together vendors, brokers, employers, carriers, and investors around a shared commitment: the tools guiding employees through their benefits decisions should be safe, effective, and built on trust.

We are not trying to pick winners or mandate a single approach. We believe in a big tent — whether you are using a traditional decision support calculator, a next-generation AI agent, or a year-round advocacy platform, the guidance needs to meet a real standard. Clarity. Transparency. Validation. The early response from the industry has been overwhelming, and it confirms what I suspected: this is a conversation people have been waiting to have. There is a lot more coming.

3. ICHRA Is Getting Its Infrastructure Moment

The ICHRA story in May was less about adoption numbers and more about the plumbing that will allow the market to actually scale.

Oscar Health launched ICHRAx — a plug-and-play data exchange designed to connect carriers, brokers, and ICHRA platforms through standardized data formats. This is the kind of infrastructure development that does not make for a flashy headline but is genuinely important. Standardized data exchange is what allows an ecosystem to stop reinventing the wheel and start building on top of each other. Oscar's willingness to convene competitors around a shared standard is a sign of a market that is maturing.

On the carrier side, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield launched an ICHRA initiative with Thatch, creating a regional model worth watching for how BCBS plans can enter this space. State-level tax incentives in Mississippi and Ohio are lowering the barrier for small employers. Employer adoption among companies with 50 or more employees grew 34% from 2024 to 2025, and at the BPRO Broker Expo, 92.8% of attending brokers expect significant ICHRA growth over the next five years.

I have said it before and I will keep saying it: ICHRA is not a niche play anymore. The brokers and platforms that treat it as a core part of their distribution strategy — and invest in the guidance experience, not just the back-end infrastructure — are the ones who will be well-positioned for what comes next.

4. The GLP-1 Reckoning Is Here

Healthcare cost pressures are not a new story, but the GLP-1 chapter is getting harder to ignore. Mercer projects a 6.5% increase in the total cost of health plans per employee in 2026 — the highest rate in over a decade — and GLP-1 medications are a major driver.

Nearly 8 in 10 employers report that GLP-1s are increasing their healthcare costs. Two-thirds currently cover them for weight management, but less than three-quarters say they are likely to continue that coverage into 2027. That is a significant shift in a very short window, and it is forcing trade-offs that are showing up in other parts of the benefits package — we are seeing major employers cut parental leave and pause 401(k) matches to offset the cost.

It is also pushing employers toward alternative pharmacy benefit models. Transcarent's partnership with SmithRx is a good example of the appetite for more transparent, unbundled approaches to pharmacy spend. And on the legislative side, the reintroduction of the bipartisan "Patients Before Monopolies Act" — aimed at breaking up PBM and health insurer ownership of pharmacies — signals that regulatory pressure on the pharmacy supply chain is not going away.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The thread running through all of this is accountability. Who is accountable for the guidance an employee receives? Who is accountable when an AI tool gives a wrong answer, or when a GLP-1 benefit gets cut mid-year, or when an ICHRA enrollee ends up in the wrong plan?

The industry has spent the last several years building faster, smarter, more connected tools. May felt like the month where a growing number of people started asking whether those tools are actually working for the people they are supposed to serve — and starting to do something about it.

That is the work I am most energized by right now. If you want to talk through what any of these trends mean for your strategy, I'd love to connect.