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Alight is significantly deepening its strategic partnership with IBM, integrating IBM's advanced watsonx AI and governance capabilities to redefine the landscape of benefits administration. This multi-year collaboration is centered on deploying agentic AI to create more intuitive, efficient, and personalized experiences for both employers and their employees, all built upon a foundation of responsible AI practices.
Alight and IBM are expanding their collaboration to embed IBM's watsonx AI platform across Alight's human capital solutions.
The partnership includes creating a joint AI innovation lab to rapidly prototype and test new AI-driven use cases for benefits administration.
Early prototypes have demonstrated a potential to increase employee productivity by over 90% in specific tasks.
The collaboration will focus on four key domains: personalized Worklife experiences, benefits modernization, internal colleague tools, and delivery productivity.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate will be used to automate workflows and connect data silos across Alight's systems.
IBM watsonx.governance will ensure all AI deployments are ethical, transparent, and compliant.
The core of this expanded initiative is the creation of a virtual AI innovation lab. This lab will unite specialists from Alight and IBM with clients to identify and develop high-impact AI applications. The focus is on moving beyond automation to optimize entire enterprise operations and foster continuous co-innovation. Initial pilots for new solutions are scheduled for early 2026.
This collaboration is positioned as a significant step forward in blending high-tech capabilities with a human-centric approach. As Dave Guilmette, Chief Executive Officer at Alight, stated: “This collaboration with IBM represents a pivotal moment in delivering high-tech innovation with human touch across our platform. By embedding IBM watsonx enterprise AI throughout our portfolio of solutions, as well as within Alight Worklife®, we are transforming how employers assess and measure the impact of their offerings and how employees experience their benefits.”
The partnership will target innovation across four strategic areas:
Embedding AI in Alight Worklife: Powering personalized chat and task automation for benefits, health, wealth, and leave management.
Benefits Administration Modernization: Streamlining data models and using automated configuration to accelerate client onboarding and improve employer decision-making.
Enhancing Colleague Experience: Applying AI to automate internal HR and IT tasks for Alight's own workforce, improving efficiency that translates to a better client experience.
Advancing Delivery and Productivity: Leveraging generative and agentic AI to transform workflows, speed up client implementation, and increase benefits utilization.
Underpinning all these initiatives is a strong commitment to ethical AI, managed through the comprehensive oversight and compliance controls provided by IBM watsonx.governance.
This expanded alliance between Alight and IBM signals a major shift towards intelligent, agent-driven platforms in the HCM space, aiming to deliver tangible productivity gains and a more engaging employee journey.
Alight is a leading cloud-based human capital technology and services provider for many of the world’s largest organizations and 35 million people and dependents. Through the administration of employee benefits, Alight helps clients gain a benefits advantage while building a healthy and financially secure workforce by unifying the benefits ecosystem across health, wealth, wellbeing, absence management and navigation. Our Alight Worklife® platform empowers employers to gain a deeper understanding of their workforce and engage them throughout life’s most important moments with personalized benefits management and data-driven insights, leading to increased employee wellbeing, engagement and productivity.
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