bswift Unveils Enhanced AI Native Emma™ Chat with Personalized, Plan-Specific Answers and Smooth Transitions to Human Support

CHICAGO, Feb. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- bswift, a leading benefits technology and HR administration company, today announced the latest evolution of Emma Chat, its benefits support chat experience powered by Emma Intelligence™.

Emma Chat is built to help employees get clear answers to everyday benefits questions, using each employer's benefits materials and configuration, along with employee-specific eligibility and enrollment context. With claims integration enabled, Emma can also deliver proactive, plan-specific guidance—helping employees understand next steps and avoid common downstream friction. Under the hood, Emma Intelligence uses a multi-agent architecture to retrieve the right plan details, apply the right context, and route each interaction to the fastest path to resolution.

Emma Chat is achieving an 80% autonomous resolution rate, helping reduce service burden while improving the benefits experience for employees.

Optimized for resolution, not containment

bswift designed Emma Chat to resolve the right issues in the right channel. Many employee questions are simple and repeatable—perfect for instant self-service and AI. But benefits also include moments that are personal, nuanced, or high stakes, where employees want to talk things through with a human.

That's why Emma's 80% autonomous resolution rate is intentional: It reflects strong self-service performance without forcing "containment" at the expense of the employee experience. When a human is the right next step, Emma makes it easy to reach a representative—without dead ends, loops, or unnecessary friction. 

"You'll hear companies quote 90%+ containment, but too often that means they've optimized to discourage human support, even when it's really needed," said Eric Strom, SVP, Service Center at bswift. "We've optimized Emma Chat to resolve the right questions in the right channel: Our mix of self-service and human touch is by design."

Richer context creates greater clarity for employees 

Employees often have benefits questions during moments where confusion creates unnecessary follow-up work: Life events, enrollment decisions, coverage changes, and spending account details.

The latest evolution of Emma Chat supports employees with faster, plan-specific answers with real-time learning that improves performance over time. Emma's multi-agent architecture helps ensure answers are grounded in the right sources, bringing together plan content, configuration, and member context before generating a response.

Capabilities include:

• Coverage and enrollment clarity
• Plan comparison during enrollment
• Spending account education
• Life event guidance
• Program discovery and benefits awareness

In 2025, Emma handled more than 750,000 messages across 150,000 chat sessions¹—helping employees get answers faster and reducing avoidable strain on service teams.

Claims data integration powers proactive resolution

With claims integration enabled, Emma can move from reactive Q&A to anticipatory resolution, helping employees avoid predictable friction like out-of-network surprises, deductible confusion, and prior-authorization delays. Emma coordinates claims signals with plan rules and eligibility context to surface the next best step early, in the moment it matters.

Emma can also support plan-specific spending and prescription questions using claims data such as deductible progress, member responsibility, and refill activity, so employees get answers that reflect their real situation, not generic benefits language.

"Claims integration helps Emma operate like a trusted advisor—thinking two steps ahead," said Matt Waldrup, EVP, Product at bswift. "The experience feels more human because it's not just answering what someone typed in a box. It's recognizing the context behind the question and proactively guiding the employee to the next best step."

Seamless support hands-offs

When a human conversation is the best next step, Emma transfers employees to a live representative without adding friction and carries over the full conversation context. Representatives can see what the employee asked, what Emma already answered, and what still needs follow-up, so they can start in the right place. This reduces repeat explanations for employees and helps accelerate resolution.

The Technology Behind Emma Chat: Emma Intelligence

Emma Intelligence is bswift's AI technology, layered across the bswift ecosystem to solve real-world benefits and service challenges. It powers experiences like guided enrollment and decision support, benefits support chat, analytics and insights, and service tools that help teams resolve issues faster and more consistently. Emma Intelligence is grounded in bswift's Mindful AI^® principles, designed to be transparent, reliable, and accountable, with ongoing feedback from HR leaders and employees to continuously improve outcomes.

¹Internal data from bswift, 2025

About bswift

bswift LLC is a leading provider of cloud-based benefits technology and employee engagement solutions. Known for continuous innovation and our people-first culture, we enable clients to deliver rewarding experiences that maximize engagement, simplify benefits navigation, and optimize utilization. Our flexible, highly scalable platform offers personalized online enrollment, interactive decision support, AI-infused benefits support, ACA compliance reporting, and custom communications. Discover more at bswift.com.

Media contact:
Zoya Siddiqui, Senior Director, Marketing, [email protected]

SOURCE bswift LLC