Alight Expands AI Collaboration With IBM to Advance Benefits Administration and Employee Experiences

Alight, Inc.  , a leading cloud-based human capital and technology-enabled services provider, today announced an expanded, multi-year collaboration to deploy IBM watsonx into Alight's offerings to transform the employee benefits experience and optimize enterprise operations. This collaboration further advances Alight’s digital transformation and aims to equip clients with AI-powered tools that deliver hyper-personalized benefits support for employees through the responsible use of AI.

As part of the collaboration, Alight and IBM are creating a virtual AI innovation lab to accelerate the reengineering of business processes, rapidly prototype new AI solutions, and foster an environment for continuous co-innovation. The lab will bring together specialists from both organizations along with Alight clients to identify and test potential AI use cases, optimize benefit guidance such as leave of absence support, and create new capabilities tailored to client needs.

Initial prototypes from the existing collaboration centering on the Alight Worklife AI Assistant experience have shown potential to increase employee productivity by over 90% underscoring the potential impact of AI-driven innovation as the work moves toward full-scale deployment. Pilots are scheduled for early 2026, with broader rollout expected in the first half of 2026.

“This collaboration with IBM represents a pivotal moment in delivering high-tech innovation with human touch across our platform,” said Dave Guilmette, Chief Executive Officer at Alight. “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.”

At the core of the collaboration is IBM watsonx Orchestrate, a product offering more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and its partners. Alight will leverage watsonx Orchestrate to enable seamless automation and information flow across Alight’s internal systems, applications, and AI agents. This orchestration will aim to eliminate silos and accelerate the delivery of new capabilities across Alight’s enterprise data fabric. This work will include leveraging the watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog—a central marketplace launched in May that simplifies discovery, deployment and enhancements of enterprise agents from IBM, its partners, and custom builds.

“We’re excited to be working with Alight to create AI-powered human capital solutions that will benefit many of the world’s largest organizations and their employees,” said Adam Lawrence, General Manager, IBM Americas. “Through our AI innovation lab, we’re prototyping new solutions and deploying IBM watsonx Orchestrate AI agents and a comprehensive enterprise agentic AI architecture to enhance the employee benefits experience. Together with Alight, we can look beyond automating tasks to help optimize enterprise operations and support continuous innovation.”

Four strategic domains of innovation

Alight and IBM will collaborate across four high-impact use case domains, underpinned by enterprise-grade governance and AI orchestration:

1. Embedding watsonx across Alight Worklife – to power AI-enabled personalized chat and task automation experiences across Alight’s benefits administration, health navigation, wealth, wellbeing, and leaves management solutions.
2. AI-enabled benefits administration modernization – Streamlining data models to reduce complexity and accelerate onboarding and time to value. Automated configuration and insights extraction will enhance decision-making for employers.
3. Enhancing the Alight colleague experience – Applying AI to automate repetitive HR and IT tasks and enhance self-service tools for Alight’s workforce, mirroring IBM’s own “Client Zero” transformation that is expected to help it achieve more than $4 billion in productivity savings by the end of this year. These efficiencies in turn enhance the Alight client experience.
4. Advancing delivery and productivity – Leveraging generative and agentic AI to transform workflows and business processes to accelerate client implementation, improve employer satisfaction, and increased employee benefits utilization through enhanced experiences.

To promote transparency, responsibility, accountability and ethical AI, the collaboration will also leverage IBM watsonx.governance, which provides comprehensive oversight, monitoring, and compliance controls across AI deployments. This includes lifecycle management, fairness and bias evaluation, regulatory mapping, and audit trails—reinforcing Alight’s own ongoing commitment to responsible AI.

HR Technology Insights: Onbe and Payroll Growth Partners Team Up to Deliver Digital Rewards that Boost Employee Loyalty
To participate in our interviews, please write to our HRTech Media Room at  info@intentamplify.com
Source:  Businesswire