Your benefits team is already using AI to answer ERISA questions. We can help you ensure that they are using it effectively — and prudently.
Free online training for benefits professionals on how to get useful, verifiable work out of AI — and how to recognize when what you are looking at is confident and wrong. It is open to anyone with a free account on this site, which takes a minute to create, costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
The tools are the easy part.
Nearly everyone who tries AI on benefits work has the same two experiences in the first week: an answer that saves an hour, and an answer that would have been embarrassing if they had sent it. The difference between those two is almost never the model. It is how the question was asked, what context was supplied, and whether anyone checked.
Everyone can learn to prompt AI better, and to more reliably give it the context that makes its answers better. It is not a talent and it is not technical — it is a set of habits, and the habits are learnable. We offer basic training on how to do this. It is online, it is on demand, and you work through it at your own pace. It is worth having whether or not you ever buy anything from us, and the same habits make you a better user of the Research Assistant and of the SKILLs Suite.
The training is free. It is behind a free account on this site, the same account you use to subscribe to the Research Assistant, to buy or renew the SKILLs Suite. Creating one costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Registration is governed by our account and registration terms and our privacy notice, and we will not add you to a marketing list as a condition of signing up.
One of the six habits: point at the documents, and ask what it assumed.
Practical, and specific to benefits work.
Worked through with real benefits questions — a part-time exclusion, a severance arrangement, a controlled-group problem — rather than generic prompting advice borrowed from marketing or software.
Where AI helps and where it fails
The four gaps that matter in this field: it does not know how to think about ERISA's interlocking provisions, it does not know your plan, it is stale in an area that moves quarterly, and it does not know when to stop. Knowing the shape of the failure is most of the defense.
Asking a question properly
Leading with context rather than the bare question, pointing at documents instead of letting the tool assume a plan term, and asking for an issue-spotting pass before a finished draft. Before-and-after examples throughout.
Working iteratively
Treating the first answer as a draft, correcting bluntly rather than politely, and the single question that catches more errors than any other: what did you assume that I did not tell you?
Giving it your own documents
Standing up a workspace holding your plan documents, SPDs, and administrative forms so answers are about your plan rather than a plan in general — and confirming the documents are actually being read, which is the step people skip.
Telling a good answer from a plausible one
How to make the tool show its work — name the document, quote the governing language, cite the section — and what it means when it will not. Plus the checks worth running every time before anything leaves your desk.
Data hygiene and what not to delegate
What should never go into a prompt, how to test coverage without participant names, and the categories of decision that stay with the plan sponsor, the administrator, and the named fiduciaries no matter how good the draft looks.
Written for the person actually doing the work.
A good fit
- A one-person benefits function that fields every question and has nobody to hand the hard ones to.
- A benefits department wanting its team to work the same way rather than each person improvising.
- In-house counsel deciding what they are willing to let their team use AI for.
- Advisory firms, TPAs, and brokers whose people answer benefits questions for clients all day.
Not for you
- Anyone looking for a software demonstration. This is instruction, not a sales walkthrough.
- Anyone wanting substantive ERISA training. The subject is how to use the tools, not the law itself.
- Anyone hoping to remove professional judgment from benefits work. The training argues the opposite.
The on-demand training is available now
Create a free account and work through it at your own pace. It is the same account you use to subscribe to the Research Assistant, to buy or renew the SKILLs Suite, and to see which Release your organization holds and your License ID. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and we will not add you to a marketing list as a condition of having one. See the account terms and the privacy notice.
Past sessions
If we run a live session, it will be recorded and the recording will be listed here afterward.
Start the training, and review the free sections of the Desk Reference.
The training is free and on demand. The free pages of the Desk Reference need no account at all, and a subscription adds the full text and the research assistant.
Start the training → Read the free sections of the Desk Reference → Consider a subscription to the Research Assistant →