LACERS AI-powers retirement services

From analog anchor to AI-powered agency

In the pantheon of endless tasks, the red tape of retirement planning has to be one of humanity’s universal least favorites. 

Luckily for LA city employees, LACERS makes it as straightforward, painless, and rewarding as possible. The Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System serves about 50,000 active and retired members and administers benefits touching more than 200,000 civilian city employees, with a pension fund currently at $24 billion.

But for an 80-year-old agency built on paper, getting there required nothing short of a digital transformation.

The problems ran deep. LACERS managed over 500 different forms, with 170 in active use. Documents arrived through email, fax, and traditional mail, creating workflow chaos: files saved to personal desktops, siloed drives, and teams unknowingly duplicating work. Legal opinions and precedents dating back to 1932 sat in physical archives, at constant risk of being applied inconsistently. Because of all this, Chief Information Officer Vikram Jadhav says, “We were beholden to analog processes. We had to show up in the office and interface directly with customers, or we could create a delay in their benefits.”

Looming over all of it was the “silver tsunami” — a projected loss of 60% of staff to retirement within five to seven years, threatening to take irreplaceable institutional knowledge with them.

To remedy all of the above, LACERS needed one all-inclusive platform to serve as the central hub for all content and workflows — and a partner with a roadmap it could believe in.

The right platform for a unified, AI-first future

After evaluating the market, Jadhav chose Box. “I wanted something that was all-in,” he explains. “I wanted a roadmap that would service our needs and begin chipping away at the myriad contracts we were holding.”

The organization's digital transformation started with the low-hanging fruit that would have the maximum impact: migrating away from legacy SharePoint systems and consolidating the content collaboration that had previously been scattered across email threads into Box.

The phased approach to Intelligent Content Management included:

1. Box Sign, replacing costly per-envelope e-signature solutions with a fully integrated tool
2. Box Hubs + Box AI, forming the foundation of a new intranet and departmental portals
3. Box Consulting, analyzing and mapping workflows to identify critical inefficiencies and areas of duplication

“Moving all our collaboration and communication into a cloud-based system was really the first flag in the ground of what a new world could look like,” Jadhav says. “Once our staff could not live without Box, and they realized how much better their work experience was, that opened up the doors to so many other use cases.”

AI slashes onboarding time by two-thirds

The aha moment came with Box Hubs for employee training. Previously, new hires faced six to eight months of onboarding using paper binders.

Box Hubs centralizes work by creating a single source of truth where teams can then leverage AI on demand to answer questions and generate new documents based on agency content. LACERS built out training portals in Box Hubs, with Box AI embedded to surface procedures, answer questions, and guide staff through complex topics. With this new system, LACERS cut the onboarding window to just two to three months.

The impact reached the executive level, too. Box Hubs has transformed how leadership operates, enabling executives to ask plain-language questions of the organization's content and get quick, AI-generated, citable answers. “We're using Box AI now for things like generating a single report by pulling key parameters and citing other reports from across our organization,” Jadhav explains. “It's really being felt at the executive levels, in both time savings and visibility.”

A retirement application cut from days to one hour

Next, the digitization of LACERS’ most consequential member interaction: the retirement application itself.

Working with Box Consulting, LACERS built out a retirement application portal that trims an 80-page paper form down to a streamlined digital experience. The experience is expedited with prefilled, editable fields and the ability to log out and save for later without losing progress. The entire process is now held within a single Box environment, enabled by:

• Box Shield for extra protection of PII
• Box Governance for compliant application lifecycle management
• Box Relay for workflow automation
• Box Sign for native e-signature

A process that used to take an average of two days now takes LA city employees roughly an hour.

Next step: LACERS is consolidating its 170 active paper forms into approximately 20 intelligent, dynamic digital forms using Box Forms — with Box AI extracting structured data automatically, saving around 30 minutes of manual labor per task.

This is why Jadhav says that “Box has been hugely instrumental for our ability to function in a world of work from anywhere and deliver the same degree of service. It has allowed us to improve our member experience and how our members engage with us.”

Preserving 80 years of institutional knowledge with AI

Perhaps the most consequential use of Box AI at LACERS isn’t a single form or portal. It’s the agency’s institutional memory.

With decades of legal opinions, board resolutions, member precedents, and procedural guidance locked in physical archives, LACERS faces a genuine knowledge-continuity crisis as retirement waves approach.

By consolidating that content into Box and making it accessible through AI-powered search and generation, LACERS can now ensure consistent, quality-controlled guidance across member inquiries, board reports, and staff decisions — regardless of who’s in the building.

“We'd been planning for this change,” Jadhav says, “and we started with content because it’s the most tactile and it's the thing that everybody touches.”

The result: A lagging, analog organization has evolved into a future-focused, digital-first one — with the institutional knowledge of 80 years now preserved, searchable, and actionable.

Straddling two worlds with secure, compliant AI

Jadhav holds the vision of digitizing member experiences alongside the nitty-gritty of security governance. He says, “As we move digital, we’re bringing cybersecurity elements into the fold so we’re not just innovating, but making sure we’re maintaining a safe and secure environment. We’re on the one hand a fund manager, and on the other, a service-delivery organization. Where it gets interesting is that we live in the middle ground between finance and government.”

Box’s zero-trust architecture, single sign-on, HIPAA compliance, and enhanced governance features gave LACERS the foundation to move fast without compromising member data. And FedRAMP and GovRAMP High (Class D) certifications gave Jadhav something else: confidence to go further. Because Box is pre-vetted under StateRAMP, any Box partner integration is effectively pre-approved for LACERS. “Everything is kind of now built up and around Box,” he says. “Box has become a proxy for everything else that is brought in.”

That trust is what makes AI adoption possible at an agency handling the retirement security of hundreds of thousands of people.

We hold ourselves to a high bar for the security of our customers and employee data. When we were selecting a partner to help us digitize our workflows, we saw in Box a company that held their solutions to those same high standards.