LaSalle Benefits partnered with Integrated AI to deliver 10 production Claude Projects, a signed HIPAA-aware AI Governance Policy, and a two-day onsite training built around live client work. The engagement ran discovery to trained team in about six weeks, timed to land ahead of the open enrollment season.
LaSalle Benefits is a tech-enabled corporate benefits firm in Northbrook, IL, founded in 2017 by Bill Gimbel, a 30-year industry veteran and TRUE Network of Advisors member. The firm advises small-to-midsize employers across professional services, technology, manufacturing, and financial services. The team is senior and lean, and the bottleneck was clear: too many hours going into rebuilding spreadsheets, retyping forms, and hand-assembling documents every renewal cycle.
The team's earlier attempt with another AI tool failed at something as basic as changing the year from 2025 to 2026 across a booklet.Discovery finding, AI Use Case Inventory · June 2026
| Industry | Employee Benefits Brokerage |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 · Northbrook, IL |
| Champion | Bill Gimbel, Founder & President |
| Network | TRUE Network of Advisors member |
| Platform | Rippling benefits administration |
| Stack | Claude Team + 10 Custom Projects |
The discovery session surfaced the same pattern across every workflow: the inputs already exist, the output follows a template, and a skilled person spends hours re-keying between the two.
50 to 200 open enrollment booklets every fourth quarter, each built by hand off the marketing report, then reviewed by a second person, then checked a final time. Dates and rates updated throughout, one document at a time.
Five or six carrier proposals come back per RFP. Someone pulls the key figures out of each one and types them into a side-by-side comparison, choosing among four spreadsheet templates by rating type. Hours of data entry, on the numbers clients use to decide.
Post-renewal compliance notices and Medicare Part D notices went out uncustomized, because customizing each one by hand was never feasible. A required deliverable, delivered at the minimum, purely for lack of time.
Most AI rollouts start with the tool and hope the workflows follow. This engagement inverted that: map the team's actual week first, put the data rules in writing before anything is built, then train on live client work.
Two days, 8:30 to 4:00, the full LaSalle team. Every session was either a live demo on real materials or a hands-on lab on the team's own client files. Homework between the days: bring one real deliverable from your current workload to build on Day 2.
Day 1 built confidence in order: the rules first, then the tool, then the six use cases the team touches most. By end of day, every team member had run a morning use case on their own live client work in Lab #1.
Day 2 finished the demo set, then gave the team almost three hours to build and share real deliverables from their own queues. The afternoon ran the Beyond the Prompt track from the 37-slide master deck: Use, Extend, Own.
Tap a card for what the project does and the data rule it enforces. Every project ships with custom instructions, LaSalle's own templates and worked examples, a prompt set, and a quick reference card. A person reviews every output before it reaches a client.
Switch tabs to see how three of the team's highest-volume workflows changed shape.
Training finished July 8. Rather than projecting hours saved, this engagement measures them: a 30-day metrics review with Bill covers hours saved, adoption, and incidents, and a 60-day review decides the next phase. The success criteria below were set before the trainer left the room.
The onsite wrapped July 8. Real testimonials from Bill and the LaSalle team will be captured at the 30-day metrics review and added here.
The early signal is already visible: within a week of training, the team was extending the prompt library on their own, adding three new workflow prompts from their live renewal work. The 30-day review will ask:
Including the one most vendors skip: telling a benefits firm what AI must not touch, before showing what it can.
Twenty use cases surfaced from the team's own words, ranked together by time saved and ease of build. The ten that got built were the team's picks, not a generic playbook.
The Claude Team plan carries no BAA, so the policy says so plainly: no PHI, no identifiable member data, de-identify or go synthetic. Signed before training. A per-use-case table makes the rule concrete.
A PII masking toolkit ships with the engagement: one-click census masking and quote sanitizing with a local token key, so following the policy is the easy path, not the slow one.
Every project produces output in the firm's existing templates: the rate workbooks, the benefit guide design, the illustration shell, the carrier forms. Nothing to reformat, nothing to re-learn.
Two days in Northbrook with homework in between: bring a real deliverable from your queue. Every team member left having shipped work, not having watched demos.
Office hours at weeks +1 and +3, a 30-day metrics review, a 60-day decision on the next phase drawn from the ten roadmapped use cases. No Phase 2 promised until Phase 1 proves out.
For employee benefits brokerages and the professional services firms that look like them: where the people you trust most spend their busiest quarter on work a template already knows how to do.