bswift Debuts AI Analytics to Combat Soaring Employee Health Costs

CHICAGO, IL – March 10, 2026 – As employers brace for another year of staggering increases in healthcare costs, benefits technology firm bswift today unveiled a new suite of advanced analytics dashboards, aiming to arm companies with the data-driven insights needed to rein in spending. The new tools are designed to move beyond static annual reports, offering real-time visibility into employee benefits decisions and enrollment trends.

The announcement comes as businesses face unprecedented financial pressure from their health plans. Recent industry analyses paint a grim picture for 2026, with firms like Aon projecting U.S. employer healthcare costs will climb by 9.5%, pushing the average per-employee cost well over $17,000. These increases, the highest in over a decade, are fueled by the rising prevalence of chronic conditions, persistent medical inflation, and the surging cost of specialty drugs, including popular GLP-1 therapies. Faced with this reality, employers are desperately seeking strategies that go beyond simply shifting costs to their workforce.

From Reactive Reporting to Proactive Strategy

For years, benefits administration has relied on historical data and cumbersome spreadsheet-based analysis, often leaving HR teams to make critical plan design decisions based on lagging indicators. bswift's new offering aims to break this cycle by providing dynamic, near real-time intelligence.

"As costs rise, clients need constant optimization—not static reports," said Ted Bloomberg, CEO of bswift, in the announcement. "These dashboards are part of our ongoing investment in tools that help employers spot issues faster and run their benefits program with tighter cost discipline."

The new platform features two primary dashboards. The first, the Dashboard for Enrollment Adoption and Trends, allows employers to monitor enrollment activity as it happens during the critical annual enrollment window. This enables HR teams to identify lagging participation, spot potential confusion, and adjust communication strategies on the fly to better guide employees while decisions are still being made. Post-enrollment, the tool provides multi-year trend analysis to highlight shifts in plan selection and adoption patterns, informing more strategic long-term plan design.

The second, the Dashboard for Emma EnrollPro™ Guidance Enrollment Interactions, provides a unique window into the employee decision-making process itself. It aggregates anonymized data from interactions with bswift's AI-powered decision support tool, Emma EnrollPro™. By analyzing the questions employees ask and the preferences they state, employers gain structured insight into what their workforce truly values, where benefits education is falling short, and which trade-offs employees are making when selecting coverage.

"Cost control in benefits doesn't come from a single headline metric," explained Matt Waldrup, EVP of Product at bswift. "It comes from understanding how employees make trade-offs, where confusion leads to inefficiency, what's driving avoidable service demand, and how small design or communication changes can influence utilization over time. These dashboards are built to surface those signals."

Decoding Employee Intent with 'Mindful AI'

The intelligence layer powering these insights is bswift's proprietary Emma™ Intelligence, an AI-native technology embedded across its platform. As employees use the Emma EnrollPro™ guided enrollment experience, the system captures valuable, aggregated data on their priorities—whether it’s a preference for lower premiums, a need for robust mental health coverage, or concerns about prescription drug costs.

This capability effectively transforms the enrollment process into a continuous, high-participation focus group, offering a richer and more immediate alternative to traditional, often low-response employee surveys. For employers, this data is a goldmine for refining plan offerings and communication strategies to steer employees toward more appropriate and cost-effective choices that better fit their actual needs, potentially reducing avoidable spend on underutilized or poorly understood benefits.

bswift frames its use of artificial intelligence under a "Mindful AI®" philosophy, emphasizing four core principles: augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing them, ensuring privacy by default, deploying only defensible and explainable technology, and remaining flexible for future advancements. This approach aims to build trust with both employers and employees, a critical factor when handling sensitive personal and health-related data.

A Competitive Gambit in a Data-Driven Market

bswift's launch intensifies the competition in the crowded benefits technology space, where data analytics and AI have become the new table stakes. Major players like Alight, with its LumenAI™ engine, and ADP, with its DataCloud platform, have also invested heavily in providing employers with data-driven insights to manage their benefits programs. These platforms similarly leverage vast datasets to help clients benchmark their offerings and identify cost-saving opportunities.

The key differentiator bswift appears to be pushing is the direct, real-time feedback loop between its employee-facing AI decision support tool and the employer-facing analytics dashboard. By capturing insights at the precise moment of decision-making, the company claims it can provide a more granular understanding of employee intent and behavior, moving beyond simple enrollment statistics to the "why" behind them.

This strategic shift reflects a broader transformation within HR and benefits administration. As companies grapple with the dual challenges of attracting and retaining talent while controlling runaway expenses, the ability to strategically manage benefits has become a critical business function. Tools that offer predictive insights and enable proactive cost management are no longer just an administrative convenience but a strategic necessity. By providing a clearer view into how benefits are understood, selected, and utilized, bswift and its competitors are positioning analytics as the central nervous system for modern, resilient benefits programs.

The new dashboards are available now to bswift's existing benefits administration clients, providing them a new tool in their arsenal as they prepare for the financial realities of the coming years.