MetLife's U.S. president says AI and smarter plan design are closing the worker protection gap
Your employees are not buying enough protection — and most of them do not know it until it is too late. That is the blunt assessment of Ramy Tadros, regional president of MetLife's U.S. Business and head of MetLife Holdings in New York, who argues that a "confusion gap" around employee benefits is driving chronic underinsurance across the American workforce.
For HR directors and benefits managers navigating open enrollment season, the message carries real urgency. MetLife's 2026 U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study found that 83 percent of employees cite rising living expenses and medical costs as their top stressors, and financial confidence among workers has fallen to its lowest level since 2012. Yet the coverage that could buffer many of those financial shocks, life insurance, disability, critical illness, dental, often goes unpurchased simply because employees do not understand what they need or why it matters.
"People aren't buying enough protection," Tadros said. "It's not a category that people wake up wanting to purchase. They only realize they don't have it when they need it. And we think the way to closing that protection gap is through closing that confusion gap."
AI is coming to open enrollment — and HR leaders should welcome it
The traditional open enrollment experience — a benefits fair, a call center, a thick booklet — has long struggled to deliver genuinely personalized guidance to individual employees at scale. Tadros says that is changing rapidly, and HR teams stand to benefit directly.
MetLife, which covers approximately 50 million people and their dependents, is deploying AI-driven enrollment guidance that walks individual employees through personalized benefit selections in 10 to 15 minutes. More than two million people will go through this experience this enrollment season, receiving a tailored shopping list of benefit options based on their personal circumstances and what their employer offers.
"Historically, that was done by sometimes boots on the ground — the person in the cafeteria, sometimes with a call center," Tadros said. "We are now starting to do this with technology at scale."
The practical implication for HR leaders is significant. Rather than relying on generic communications that fail to connect individual employees to the right coverage, employers now have access to carrier-led technology that makes the guidance personal — without adding headcount or cost. The result, Tadros argues, is better-protected employees and a stronger return on the benefits investment employers are already making.
Demand more from your benefits broker
The shift in what technology can deliver should also prompt HR decision-makers to raise their expectations of their benefits brokers and advisors. Tadros was direct: the intermediary model is under pressure to evolve, and employers — particularly those running larger, more complex benefit programs — should be demanding more consultative value from their broker relationships.
"This is not just about 'help me find the best and cheapest coverage,'" he said. "It's 'help me really think about the design of my benefit programs, help me think about the ROI of those programs in my context' — and no two employers are the same."
MetLife's 2026 Employee Benefit Trends Study found that controlling healthcare costs is now the number one benefits objective among U.S. employers, surpassing productivity, loyalty, and attracting new talent for the first time since 2022. Tadros said that in a market defined by rising medical and pharmacy costs, brokers who cannot bring data-driven insight to plan design decisions — from workforce demographics to claims trends — are falling short of what employers need.
He also pointed to a specific innovation in dental plan selection that illustrates how data can sharpen employer decision-making. Historically, brokers compared dental networks on size alone — the raw count of in-network dentists. MetLife has introduced a quality metric that identifies which dentists in a network practice more preventive dentistry, producing better health outcomes and lower claims costs over time.
"Sophisticated brokers look at that and are starting to be more sophisticated in their advice of which dental carrier they should use," Tadros said. "Technology is playing a part in the advisory piece."
What this means for your benefits strategy
For HR directors and CFOs evaluating their benefits programs ahead of the next plan year, Tadros's perspective points to three concrete priorities.
First, ask your broker what data and analytics they are bringing to plan design recommendations, and if the answer is thin, push harder or look elsewhere. Second, ask your carriers what enrollment technology they offer at the employee level, and whether it can be integrated into your benefit administration platform. A quoting and enrollment process that previously consumed more than 50 hours of human effort, Tadros said, can now happen near-instantaneously through integrated digital workflows between carriers and benefit administration systems.
Third — and perhaps most importantly — invest in closing the confusion gap for your own workforce. The financial stress MetLife's research identifies in the workforce is not an abstract trend; it translates directly into absenteeism, productivity loss, and retention risk. Tadros frames this as both a business imperative and a societal one.
"As an industry, whether you're carriers or intermediaries, there's a societal need to close that protection gap," he said. "That's what I tell my nine-year-old when she asks me what I do for a living."
