In 2026, employee benefit consultants must adopt an agile mindset to navigate a volatile healthcare landscape where medical costs are projected to rise by 10% to 20% driven by insatiable healthcare inflation and the surge of high-cost innovations like GLP-1 specialty drugs.

This agility requires a pivot from rigid, traditional plan designs toward intentional, data-driven strategies, that include Pharmacy optimization, direct-pay, owning your data and guiding plan participants with effective care navigation. 

Crucially, consultants are increasingly challenged to perform with a fiduciary mindset. It is imperative to remove all conflicts of interest in your vendor and client relationships. The most successful advisors will embrace fully transparent compensation models, and removing conflicted contracts and revenue streams that are misaligned with your clients and their participants. 

By converging flexible, innovative thinking with a transparent, ethical commitment to the employer’s best interests, consultants can separate from the herd of large national conflicted business models that reward Wall Street, not Main Street.

Advisors who put their clients first will be the winners with Agile strategy. Legacy advisors who are stuck in the past will come up short.