The benefits broker of the future is not a product expert. They are a trusted advisor who can guide an employer through the full arc of their employees' working lives from a new hire's first enrollment to a long-tenured employee navigating a disability claim, a parental leave, or a bereavement.
That, according to Chris Morbelli, partner and Americas life and group benefits transformation leader at EY, is where the US group benefits market is heading, and the firms that grasp it earliest will define the competitive landscape for the next decade.
"Those leaders that can maintain pace in an unprecedented pace of change will be the leaders of the future," Morbelli said in an exclusive interview with Insurance Business Benefits US, citing a line from a broker he interviewed that has stayed with him. "How do we maintain pace in this unprecedented pace of change?"
Morbelli co-authors EY's Harnessing Growth in Workforce Benefits research series, a longitudinal study conducted in strategic partnership with LIMRA that tracks employer and employee sentiment across small, mid-size, and large employer segments. He spoke to IBB about what the research, and seven years advising carriers and increasingly brokers, has taught him about where the market is going.
The clearest shift Morbelli has observed in the broker-carrier relationship is a move from specification to demonstration. Employers and brokers are no longer willing to take a carrier's word for the quality of its employee experience and are scrutinizing the return on investment of their benefits programs.
"The market is moving from a 'tell me what you can do' to a 'show me what you can do,'" he said, again drawing on broker feedback from EY's research interviews. "Because we want to see the experience that you're going to provide to our employees and members."
That demand is being driven by a structural change in what employers believe benefits are for. Morbelli says the industry is in the middle of a shift from a product-based model where the broker's job is to assemble the right portfolio at the right price, to an outcome-based model, where the question is whether a benefits package actually delivers for the employee at the moment they need it.
"It's not about disability insurance, it's about protecting my income," he said. "It's not about caregiving services, I need, as a sandwich generation, to care for my ailing father. How do we put this into more of an outcome-based approach? It makes it more personalized, gives it more context, it makes it more relevant, and ultimately increases the value proposition and the ROI of the benefits package."
Morbelli is emphatic that this is not a cyclical trend but structural, and its engine is demographic. For the first time, Gen Z and millennials outnumber Gen X and baby boomers in the workforce, and Gen Z alone now outnumbers boomers. He describes this as a generational tipping point, one that is not just changing what employees want but how they expect to engage with benefits entirely.
"Gen Z and millennials, how they want to work, what they want to buy, and how they want to engage, is very different," he said. "The most diverse multigenerational workforce is demanding a much more personalized, life-stage, event-based approach than what's traditionally always been a one-size-fits-all."
The pressure this creates for brokers is real and growing. A brokerage leader in the Northeast told Morbelli during EY's research interviews that her firm was fielding questions extending well beyond the traditional medical and dental scope to cover leave guidance, infertility benefits, weight loss medications, and mental health services across a workforce spanning multiple generations with fundamentally different priorities.
"The brokerage community is feeling the pressure of having to bring this holistic advice and guidance to their clients," Morbelli said. "It's not just about the product anymore."
Morbelli sees carriers adapting to this reality and many of his carrier clients have moved from product profit-and-loss structures to segment-based models organized around employer size, a reorganization designed to deliver experiences better calibrated to what small, mid-size, and large employers actually need.
When Morbelli asks brokers where artificial intelligence will have the most material impact on group benefits, there’s a common answer.
"Every broker pretty much said the enrollment experience," he said. "That was interesting; they really went right to advice and guidance and helping employees choose what's best for them in this diverse, multigenerational workforce."
But Morbelli is clear that AI is a means, not an end and that the industry's current approach to it is not yet where it needs to be. "We need to move away from what traditionally, as we've been in this experimentation stage, is a bolt-on solution, where it kind of sits there and it's visible, to a built-in capability in the future where it's weaved into the underlying experience in the right places," he said.
Those right places, according to broker feedback in EY's research, are transaction-heavy touchpoints - enrollment guidance, underwriting, routine service interactions - not moments requiring human judgment and empathy. A death claim, Morbelli is quick to note, is not a candidate for automation. "Human in the loop and empathy is going to be critical in situations like a death claim," he said. "When you bring AI automating the transactions and human in the loop for the real material decisions; that's where competitive advantage is going to get created."
The area Morbelli is most focused on heading into EY and LIMRA's next research cycle, expected to publish in early 2027, is absence and leave management. He describes it as an emerging strategic frontier and one that most of the industry is still treating as an administrative function.
His argument is that as the Department of Labor and an expanding roster of state legislatures mandate new leave programs, absence is becoming more complex, more visible to employees, and more consequential for employers. Leave types are multiplying including caregiving leave, sabbaticals, and military leave, alongside the traditional maternity and paternity categories, each with its own rules, processes, and integration requirements.
And the experience, by his account, is not keeping pace. "We don't want to see absence mismanagement," he said. "The next horizon of absence and leave management is emerging."
His forward-looking thesis is one he intends to test in the 2027 research: that absence management, handled well, could become the entry point for the entire non-medical benefits relationship.
"How maybe absence is actually the front door for the entire non-medical benefits experience in the future," he said. "With all the state rules coming in, with this virtualized workforce, it's going to continue to get more and more complex - and it has such a huge value proposition to employees because it's such a relevant offering to them."
Despite the multiple challenges facing benefits brokers in 2026, Morbelli reflects optimism shared by others in the industry.
"It's never a more exciting time to be in the benefits market," he said. "But we need to all be very disciplined in how we do that, to keep the relevancy, the personalization, the context; to make it as easy to navigate for the employee as we can."
