A version of this piece was first published in Voluntary Benefits Voice, the monthly publication of Voluntary Advantage.

In Part 1 of this post, we noted that "customization creates snowflakes." That no company can scale while they’re also trying to manage the snowfall.

And that there are 3 key trends across the benefits world within which AI is expressing, shall we say... differently?

First-the leverage-point for systems is moving from “who controls the data” to “how sophisticated and flexible is the configuration?”

Second-decision support (DS) is migrating beyond the O/E window.

Third-software is starting to act, not just inform.

And we looked at how those trends are the VB world. Standardize to configuration, with true customization needs to be scoped and charged separately for, and you’ll have a documented, manageable engine where the client-specific nuances don’t live only in the brains of the account team!

Let's move on to token budgeting, and then wrap up.

How much is this costing us?
The enterprise conversation about AI is shifting from “is this useful?” to “where is it actually worth the money?” The token is becoming the operative cost unit, and the uncomfortable part is that a rising AI bill can mean real work is getting done - or it can mean the system is thrashing: re-reading context an AI assistant should already remember, retrying, or reaching for a frontier model on a task that doesn't need graduate-level compute. Anyone who's re-explained the same background to a chatbot for the fourth time has felt a version of this firsthand. At enterprise scale, that kind of friction tends to show up eventually as a real, and rising, line item.

For firms earning commission on voluntary and ancillary placements, that shift is likely to surface less as a compliance issue and more as a quiet factor in how reliable a given platform or carrier integration actually is at scale.

How this may show up
Enrollment firms operate close to the completed-unit economics this shift is really about - cost per enrolled case, per service call, per resolved exception. That makes this function one of the more exposed places for a rising AI cost to hide in plain sight, since a bigger AI bill can look identical to “the AI assistant is doing better work” when it's actually “the assistant keeps needing context to be repeated to get to an acceptable result.”

Carrier-side AI adoption is relevant here directly. As carriers push decision support and administrative automation further into their own systems, the reliability and consistency of that automation is likely to affect enrollment firms, broadly speaking - through case turnaround time, through how cleanly elections and changes flow without a manual fix, and eventually through the underlying economics of the relationship if a carrier's own AI costs start showing up in service levels or fee structures.

The instrumentation question worth having some visibility into is whether a given platform or carrier integration is getting measurably better over time, or just busier. An AI assistant that has to be walked through the same case exception repeatedly, across sessions, tends to be a sign of the latter — and it's a pattern enrollment firms are often well positioned to notice first, since they see the exception traffic directly.

A concrete version of this might show up as a case that keeps bouncing back for the same missing piece of information, even after it's been supplied once. In a manual process, that's an annoyance. In an AI-assisted one, it's also a cost, quietly incurred by whichever party's system keeps re-asking. Enrollment firms are often the ones who feel that loop first, simply because they're closest to the member and the case.

None of this needs to become an adversarial conversation with a platform or carrier partner. It's more that “how efficiently does your system actually run” is becoming as fair a question as “what does your system do” — and firms that ask it early are likely to have a clearer sense of which partners are worth building deeper integration with.

The last word
None of this changes the underlying opportunity raised in Part 1 — configuration standards freeing up time for the parts of enrollment that configurability can't replace. It does suggest that “reliable and cheap to operate” is becoming as relevant a vendor characteristic as “feature-rich,” particularly for the platforms and carrier integrations an enrollment firm depends on daily.

~ Mark Head

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