Gallagher has rolled out new AI-enabled benefits capabilities within its Benefits & HR Consulting model.
The offering, built on Avante’s AI-native benefits platform and integrated with Gallagher’s analytics ecosystem, is designed to give employees personalized, conversational guidance on their benefits and to provide employers with deeper insight into utilization patterns, cost drivers, and plan performance.
Gallagher’s AI-enabled tools are built to provide on-demand guidance that translates complex plan language into plain English, offers side-by-side comparisons of options, and generates cost projections based on real-world scenarios. The goal is to reduce decision fatigue and confusion during open enrollment and life events, and to increase employees’ confidence that they are choosing appropriate coverage.
On the employer side, the capabilities feed decision data into Gallagher Drive, the broker’s proprietary people analytics platform. Connecting Avante’s front-end decision support with Gallagher Drive is intended to give benefits and finance leaders a clearer view of utilization trends, high-cost cohorts, and opportunities to refine plan design or contribution strategies in line with workforce needs.
Gallagher is positioning this as a way for organizations to shift from reactive, campaign-based benefits education toward proactive, data-driven management of spend and employee well-being, without adding headcount in HR or shared services.
The launch comes against a backdrop of persistent medical inflation and growing scrutiny of total rewards budgets.
Large employers in North America and Europe have been reporting steady year-over-year increases in health benefit costs, driven by factors such as specialty drugs, delayed care emerging post-pandemic, and higher demand for mental health services. For many organizations, benefits already represent one of the largest people-related expenses after base pay.
At the same time, there is growing concern that employees do not fully understand, value, or appropriately use the benefits on offer.
Surveys by major consultancies in recent years have consistently shown that a significant share of employees find benefits difficult to navigate, and many simply roll over the same choices each year rather than reassessing options as their circumstances change. That disconnect between spend and perceived value is pushing employers toward decision-support tools that can improve engagement and outcomes.
In parallel, AI adoption across HR and benefits has accelerated, with use cases ranging from virtual HR assistants and leave management triage to health navigation and recommendation engines for point solutions.
The new capabilities are powered by Avante, a specialist platform built specifically for employee benefits. Avante aggregates plan and usage data and uses AI-driven analytics and virtual agents to give employees 24/7 guidance while providing HR leaders with a consolidated view of costs and engagement.
Gallagher’s partnership with Avante places it alongside a small but growing group of intermediaries and TPAs that are standardizing on external AI technology rather than building everything in-house.
“Gallagher has earned its reputation as one of the most trusted advisors in employee benefits by continually evolving to meet what clients need next,” said Rohan D’Souza, Avante CEO. “With Avante’s AI-enabled offering, Gallagher is setting a new standard for how employers and employees engage with benefits. We’re proud to support that vision with technology designed specifically for this space.”
Gallagher’s move underscores how large brokers are using AI as a differentiator in the benefits space, layering digital services and analytics on top of traditional broking and consulting.
As AI-enabled decision support becomes more commonplace, mid-sized intermediaries may face pressure either to partner with technology vendors of their own or to align with larger networks that can provide similar capabilities.
There are also governance and compliance issues for risk professionals to weigh. Benefits decision tools handle sensitive health and employment data, raising questions around privacy, security, bias, and transparency.
“Employee benefits are among the most important and most misunderstood investments organizations make,” said John Tournet, US CEO of Gallagher’s Benefits & HR Consulting division. “These new capabilities transform benefits from a once-a-year, transactional decision into a more informed, ongoing experience that helps employees choose confidently while giving employers smarter insight into how their programs are actually working.”
