As artificial intelligence transforms how we live, work, and lead, a new question is rising to the surface: how will it change the way we care for people?

In workplace health, this transformation is both overdue and full of promise. Traditional employee health strategies haven’t kept up with the complexity or scale of today’s challenges: burnout, chronic stress, rising health claims, and disengagement. These aren’t side issues anymore, they’re strategic business risks.

Mercer’s People Risk Report 2024 names rising health insurance costs as the top business risk globally. Premium costs per employee have surged 28% since 2020. Meanwhile, our research at WONE shows that high stress costs a 1,000-person organisation an additional $5.3 million annually in lost performance and health-related issues.

Inaction isn’t just costly, it’s unsustainable.

Yet despite the advances in technology and the proliferation of digital wellbeing tools, most organisations remain stuck in a reactive model. People are expected to ask for help when they’re already overwhelmed. Employers point to content wellbeing apps or their EAP as a safety net, but in reality uptake is low (often less than 5%), impact is inconsistent, and support often arrives too late. They are simply not built to mitigate harm before it occurs.

The choice is clear: continue down a path of increasing costs and risks, and declining ROI from ineffective wellbeing apps, or evolve to a solution designed for how work, and stress, operate today. We must move to a new approach: one that moves from reacting to preventing, from content apps to intelligent systems, and from one-size-fits-all to personalized care at scale.

We’ve Outgrown Reactive Health. It’s Time to Lead with Prevention.

The future of workplace health won’t replace the human side of care, but it will amplify it. AI gives us the power to predict and prevent rather than simply respond.

At WONE, we believe intelligent systems can multiply the reach and impact of care, making it more timely and more personal, and therefore more effective. Our work is focused on helping organisations shift from lagging indicators to leading ones, identifying the early signals of stress and delivering support before they escalate into illness or disengagement.

This kind of prevention requires more than data. It needs insight.

Our platform decodes each person’s unique stress signature, combining biometric, behavioural, and self-reported inputs to build a multidimensional view of how their stress resilience is shifting in real time. This allows our AI recommendation engine to deliver precisely the right micro-intervention to each individual at the moment it matters most. This could mean prompting recovery after a high stress moment - manifesting as a spike in cognitive load, or encouraging movement after prolonged sedentary focus, or offering a science-backed mindset shift before a high-stress event.

And the impact is clear. The WONE Platform experiences engagement at 8x the rate of EAPs, with 74% of individuals reporting a reduction in stress and 90% reporting an increase in productivity.

"Within weeks, my numbers vastly improved in blood tests. My cholesterol numbers improved dramatically and my insulin resistance also came down. I felt more energetic and vigorous.”
Abhishek at Plume Design

Yet the battle is not just in identifying the problem and delivering the solution for each individual, and in fact most content-based apps fail to tackle the real challenge, which is to change daily behaviours and build health habits that last. This is the gap that WONE was built to close.

AI Is the Engine - But Behaviour Is the Battlefield

We now have strong science showing how habits like movement, sleep, mindset, and recovery shape long-term health. But knowing what to do isn’t enough. Changing behaviour amidst meetings, deadlines, and constant pressure is hard, even when wellbeing is at risk.

The irony isn’t lost: we often don’t have time to look after ourselves exactly when we need it most.

That’s why the next wave of workplace health tools must integrate health into the structure of the workday itself. Not by adding to employees’ to-do lists, but by adapting to their needs, and their working environments.

“We’re building a new kind of intelligence, one that understands human behaviour in context, and designs for real life, not ideal life.”
Reeva Misra, Founder & CEO, WONE

To solve this, WONE employs a deep focus on blending behavioural AI, stress science, and neuroscience. We carefully and contextually educate, translating complex wellbeing science into personally relevant guidance. We learn over time which activities individuals enjoy most and are therefore most likely to sustain longer term. We don’t expect people to add health onto their day - instead we use technology to integrate it into how their day already works, by syncing with calendars to reduce cognitive overload and timing nudges around known stress patterns. In short, we embed wellbeing into the structure of their work.

“I like to join a session 2-3 times a week and have pretty consistently kept this up, because the sessions are short and so easy to fit into my day.”
Yvonne at Plume Design

This is what makes AI powerful in the realm of workplace health. It’s not just about analysing data. It’s about building an ecosystem that turns knowledge into action, and action into lasting change.

Importantly, none of this replaces the human side of care - it simply provides it at a superhuman scale. AI will help leaders understand where support is needed, and guide individuals with relevant insights, and free up time for meaningful connection.

“It was a huge incentive that they gave me a path to follow - it made it so easy. The fact that their experts are so experienced was also a huge draw because I knew they would have encountered people similar to me before, and therefore know exactly how to help.”
Abhishek at Plume Design

Our Vision: The Future of Health Is Personal, Predictive and Built for the Way We Work

The next generation of workplace health won’t be app-based or reactive. It will be:

• Personal: tailored to each individual’s physiological and psychological profile

• Predictive: identifying and intervening before health risks escalate

• Integrated: designed to fit naturally into the cadence of work

• Dynamic: using real-time data to guide behaviour, not just monitor it

Health strategies built on these foundations are already changing outcomes, by boosting performance, reducing cost, and helping employees thrive across all levels, from frontline to C-suite.

This is the future WONE is building, one where health becomes an embedded part of how organisations function, not an afterthought. Where employees are supported not just during crises, but every day, and where leaders gain a clearer view of how wellbeing is affecting resilience, performance, and business risk.

In this new era, organisations that integrate intelligent, behavioural, and preventive approaches, like the ones we’re building at WONE, won’t just reduce risk. They’ll build healthier, more resilient workforces that are ready to thrive.