How Covered California uses Glean to streamline health insurance services for millions of Californians
Introduction
Covered California is California’s health insurance marketplace, established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. It’s a government agency created to help eligible Californians compare and sign up for affordable, high-quality insurance from top insurance companies, and the only place where residents can get federal and state financial help to lower the cost of their premiums.
Covered California helps people research plans and health insurance coverage, choose the option that fits their health needs and budget, and get connected to the right people and resources to help them enroll. Their mission is to increase the overall number of Californians with health insurance, improve the quality of care, lower costs, and reduce health disparities through a competitive health insurance marketplace.
Avant Glean
As AI became more capable and accessible, Covered California wanted a secure, approved tool to answer its staff’s questions. Finding the right information across their complex network of systems and applications was getting difficult, and AI seemed like the perfect solution.
At first, Covered California developed an AI strategy that included an in-house, walled-off version of a LLM. However, they quickly realized they needed a more robust enterprise solution that could integrate all their data and systems into a single platform while keeping their sensitive data secure.
That’s why they turned to Glean.
Avec Glean
A match for Covered California’s security & model needs
Covered California had already spent years building a role-based security model to protect the significant amount of data it manages, including PII, (Personally Identifiable Information). A non-negotiable requirement for any new tool was that it could mirror that existing model directly, rather than forcing the organization to build and maintain a second one in parallel.
Glean’s private-by-design platform with single-tenant architecture made it possible for everyone across all systems to stay permission-aware without duplicating data or access rules. Leveraging Glean Protect +, Covered California was able to establish governance and oversight across its AI workflows while ensuring a human in the loop. Out-of-the-box sensitive content policies, customizable dashboards, and continuous sensitive content protection for 100+ data sources enabled their teams to identify and put safeguards in place for flagging PII. Automated remediation of overshared sensitive content could also identify files accidentally shared org-wide.
Agentic workflows, solved
Glean gave Covered California's staff a way to build their own agents directly. Teams built agents tackling everything from preventing calendar overload and enabling a multi-system travel policy, to addressing outdated documentation.
This agent reviews a chosen date range, analyzes the calendar, and recommends what can come off the schedule, saving an immense amount of time and tedious effort for an organization with countless daily meetings and appointments to manage.
This agent automatically pulls state travel policy from multiple government systems, a process that usually requires staff to check four different places just to get an answer. This self-service agent, built in Glean, now consolidates that guidance in one place.
This agent provides status and impact analyses for state bills by comparing them to applicable and published regulations on public-facing websites. Used by nearly everyone in Covered California's External Affairs department, this agent provided a faster, easier way to access consolidated bill context. It eliminated the need for staff to sift through state legislative websites and manually piece together status reports and implications.
A paired set of agents that assists with drafting state-standard performance reviews for staff, pulling from the employee's job description and supervisor notes to produce factor-by-factor narratives, strengths, and development goals. Built to meet Covered California's HR requirements and standards, the agents never invent examples, ask follow-up questions to better refine the evaluation, and always keep humans in the loop.
An agent that reads and annotates large marketing invoice packets, automating a manual, high-volume finance workflow. The organization is currently working to optimize this agent for continuous, long-term use.
From pilot to wall-to-wall rollout
Glean was initially rolled out as a 50-person pilot program at Covered California, primarily to teams managing policy and documentation work. By week four of the pilot, users reported saving an average of four to six hours per week. With adoption holding strong even as the program expanded across departments including Finance, HR, Facilities, Training, and more, Covered California eventually took Glean enterprise-wide, rolling it out to 1,500 employees.
Glean's intuitive interface, open platform with model choice, and vast offering of native connectors and MCP offerings helped employees to leverage AI where they already worked in a multiplayer fashion—enabling anyone to seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows and see results right away.
“Rolling out Glean enterprise-wide was a very hands-on and collaborative experience. We didn’t just roll out a tool—we built the support and training around it so staff could feel comfortable using it while also understanding how to use it responsibly. We started with a pilot, learned from it, and scaled intentionally. A big part of the rollout was meeting staff where they were, addressing concerns about AI, gathering employee feedback, and ensuring the training matched what people actually needed. I worked closely with Glean's AIOM team, and they were very easy to work with. They were flexible, responsive, and adjusted the rollout schedule and training approach to fit our culture, our readiness, and what the staff needed,” said Pa Vue, AI Solution Evangelist.
Self-service prompting
When Covered California employees were experimenting with how to create strong prompts, they leaned on Glean to help direct them. Given a scenario with a desired result, Glean produced prompts that defined what needed to be provided, which model was best fit for the task, and delivered a first pass that employees could utilize. This helped save hours of researching what information needed to be included and countless iterations usually spent on structuring prompts to deliver exactly what they needed.
Streamlined version control
With 13 years of data and information stored in SharePoint, Covered California realized they had older, outdated policy documents still lingering in their database. Through the knowledge graph, Glean helped mark outdated documentation and clearly identify where verification or removal was needed. This enabled them to simultaneously reduce risk, save time spent manually reviewing documents, and keep up with what was new or old, while still keeping humans still in the loop to verify sources.
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