What AI Is Telling Us About the Companies We Work With

If you’ve read the business section of any news outlet in the last year, you get the sense that businesses are cautious, hiring has slowed, and companies are ultimately in a defensive posture just waiting to see how things settle before making decisions.  

The narrative exists for a multitude of reasons, but, namely, pressures in the economy and uncertainty in industries. However, it’s not matching what I see in our clients’ data. And over the past year, as we’ve started using AI tools to analyze patterns across our client base in ways that were not practical before, the gap between the headline narrative and the ground-level reality has become harder to ignore.

I want to talk about what we are actually seeing, because I think it is useful for founders and CFOs who are trying to make decisions with incomplete information.

What the Data Shows About Hiring

At evco, we manage benefits for tens of thousands of employees across hundreds of companies. Headcount is one of the clearest signals we have about what is happening inside those organizations, because when companies hire, they add people to their benefits plans. When they contract, those numbers change.

What we have seen over the past twelve months is consistent growth in headcount across our small and mid-size employer clients. It’s not uniform because some sectors are quieter than others, and the pace is more measured than it was two years ago. But the companies we work with are actively hiring.

What has changed is the nature of that hiring. The employers adding people right now are being more deliberate about it. They are filling specific gaps rather than building capacity ahead of anticipated demand. They are thinking more carefully about total compensation, which increasingly means thinking more carefully about benefits, because they are competing harder for each role than they were when the labor market was looser.

That distinction matters. A company that is hiring deliberately is a company where each hire carries more weight. In other words, the cost of a bad hire goes up, and the cost of losing a strong candidate to a competitor with better coverage also goes up. The signal that your benefits program sends about how you invest in your people becomes more important, not less, in that environment.

What Cohort Analysis Is Telling Us About Premiums

One of the most useful things AI has made possible for us is cohort analysis, the ability to look at how outcomes vary across different types of companies, not just in aggregate but by specific characteristics. Company size, industry, geography, plan design, communication approach. The patterns that emerge from that kind of analysis are more specific and more actionable than broad industry benchmarks.

One pattern We See Consistently

Companies with higher preventive care utilization tend to have more favorable premium trends over time. That’s not a surprising finding in the abstract. What is surprising is the magnitude of the difference when you look at it across actual client cohorts over multiple renewal cycles. The gap between a company where employees are regularly accessing preventive care and one where they are avoiding it because out-of-pocket costs feel too high is not marginal. It is meaningful enough to be a factor in plan design decisions, not just a wellness talking point.

We also see that companies which review their utilization data mid-year and make adjustments based on what they find tend to come into renewal negotiations with stronger positions. Again, not surprising in theory. But seeing it play out consistently across hundreds of companies makes it more than a theory. It’s a pattern reliable enough to plan around.

What This Means About How We Work With Clients

The AI tools we’re using never replace the judgment that goes into benefits strategy. What they’re doing is making the underlying patterns more visible, so that the recommendations we make are grounded in something more specific than intuition or generic benchmarks.

When I sit down with a client to talk about their renewal now, I can bring data about how their situation compares to companies that actually look like theirs: similar size, similar industry, similar plan design, similar headcount trajectory. That specificity changes the conversation. Instead of talking about what is typical for a company of your size, we can talk about what is typical for a company that looks like yours in the ways that actually matter for predicting outcomes.

For founders and CFOs who want to understand what their benefits program is actually doing and what it’s likely to produce at renewal, the data available to support that conversation is richer than it has ever been. The question is whether you have a broker who is using it and willing to bring it to you.

The Practical Takeaway

The narrative about businesses pulling back may be true at an aggregate level. It’s not true of the companies we work with, and I suspect it’s not true of the companies that most of our clients compete with for talent either. The employers making deliberate investments in their people right now, including thoughtful benefits decisions based on real data, are positioning themselves differently than the ones who are waiting for the environment to clarify before they act.

That has always been the difference between reactive and proactive benefits management. The tools available to support the proactive approach are just considerably better than they used to be.

~

Brian Allen | President, evco | Managing benefits for 36,000+ lives since 2005