Plansource opened the year with transformation underway: new leadership, refreshed branding, and a partner-first strategy. Executives framed 2026 as a year to address core issues, accelerate automation, and deliver a more seamless experience for both employers and employees.

Leadership and Market Focus

CEO Mike Morini, CGO Greg Mercer, and VP of Product Kathleen Agnew emphasized that Plansource is rebuilding with domain experts and a renewed sense of purpose. The company has added multiple senior leaders in the past year and is leaning into a partner-driven model. Roughly 70% of Plansource’s business comes from partners. Their goal is straightforward—be the only benefits administration partner brokers need by innovating and delivering quality service.

Plansource wants to be known for service layered on strong technology, and for being the partner brokers and clients can reach directly for high-quality implementations and support.

Partner Relationships and the UKG Connection

Plansource’s relationship with UKG surfaced repeatedly. The consensus among attendees was that if an employer uses UKG, going directly to Plansource often yields the best implementation and service experience. Plansource teams have been working with UKG to improve utilization,  access, and resolve friction points.

AI, Automation, and Practical Innovation

Plansource is implementing measured use of AI to reduce manual work and improve accuracy. Highlights included:

• Generative AI for communications: AI will send targeted messages during events such as hurricanes, ensuring affected employees get timely, relevant guidance.
• Anomaly file detection: to surface data issues proactively.
• Guided implementation wizard: The wizard suggests best practices during configuration, intending to improve efficiency and accuracy by 15%.
• Automated transcription and rule extraction: will pull requirements from discovery calls and documents to build a master requirements document and automate testing.
• EDI automation: AI will ingest carrier spec documents to auto-map files and reduce EDI build time from months to hours while improving quality.

Plansource stressed a cautious, strategic approach to AI: to build thoughtfully, validate with prototypes, and avoid rolling out features purely for publicity.

Employee Experience and Decision Support

Plansource is investing in tools that meet employees where they work. New virtual assistants and NLP capabilities will let employees interact through Microsoft Teams or other channels to process life events, request coverage changes, or get benefits explained in plain language. The company demonstrated features that:

• Provide claims-based decision support and next-best-action nudges, such as prompting a user to file a claim when enrolled in hospital indemnity.
• Surface personalized recommendations at open enrollment, including bundled plan suggestions based on claims history.
• Offer semi-active enrollment flows that let employees skip plans but then prompt them at the end to confirm their choices with clear savings comparisons.

These features aim to turn employees into smarter benefits consumers, which in turn can reduce employer costs. Plansource also plans to embed health advocacy and richer claims insights into the platform to support better decision-making. 

Implementation, Customer Experience, and Product Demos

Plansource showcased a redesigned web experience with real-time account balances, recent transactions, and easier access to voluntary benefits and well-being offerings. The demo highlighted:

• Claims integration during open enrollment to enable bundled recommendations without lengthy questionnaires, provided sufficient claims history exists.
• Upload and comparison tools for spouse plans and future support for standardized benefit documents.
• Auto configuration portal for administrators that supports file setup, automated testing, and audit of configuration against plan documents. Clients can start builds from master templates for common plan types, and the portal reports errors and status in a centralized homepage.

Implementation leaders described a structured handoff process that brings the ongoing support team into shadow implementations for smoother transitions. Timelines can vary—three to six months is typical, with an accelerated eight-week option for certain clients.

Final Thoughts

The company’s roadmap centers on fixing core issues, improving integrations, and delivering AI-driven automation that reduces manual effort and improves accuracy. For brokers and resellers, Plansource wants to be a partner that simplifies implementations, improves employee engagement, and helps clients realize measurable benefits.