Covered California and Deloitte tap Google AI to put the human touch back into public health

Public sector organizations are at an inflection point, one where the combination of domain-specific data and agentic enterprise intelligence is producing measurable, life-changing outcomes for the populations they serve — outcomes that legacy manual workflows could never achieve at scale.

Covered California, the U.S.’s largest state-based health insurance marketplace serving more than 16 million enrolled residents, has emerged as a national benchmark for what AI-driven public sector transformation can look like in production, according to Shilpa Akunuri (pictured, right), chief technology officer at Covered California. At the heart of that transformation is a drive to remove friction from the systems that millions of Californians depend on. That work is being carried out in partnership with Deloitte Consulting LLP and Google LLC, leveraging tools such as Google’s Document AI platform to streamline eligibility and enrollment verification.

“The problem is how we eliminate the friction on our eligibility and enrollment verification platform,” Akunuri said. “Before we implemented, in partnership with Deloitte and Google, the Google Doc AI … it would take anywhere up to 72 hours for a consumer to know whether they have submitted the right kind of documents or not. With the implementation of Doc AI, we have brought that time down to almost near real time — under five seconds.”

Akunuri and Vishal Prabhu (left), managing director at Deloitte, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik at Google Cloud Next, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed agentic enterprise intelligence, intelligent document processing, operational excellence and the security posture underpinning Covered California’s AI transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Agentic enterprise intelligence meets mission-driven public health

The real-world stakes behind Covered California’s AI deployment are significant. One in every three Californians uses its enrollment and eligibility platform, which processes more than 50,000 documents per month across 80-plus document types, Akunuri noted. The automation results have been equally striking — a 54% automation rate translating to an estimated 24,000 hours of annual savings in service center operations, freeing staff to focus on high-value customer support.

“Our staff was spending a tedious number of hours — no one wakes up on a Monday thinking that I’m going to manually process tons of documents today,” Akunuri said. “It’s not just manual labor hour savings, but they can now focus on high-value customer support and providing that operational excellence to the next level.”

For Deloitte, the Covered California engagement illustrates a broader model for deploying agentic enterprise intelligence across government services. The partnership’s approach, built on a replicable solution developed with Google, has since been applied to programs like Maryland’s childcare subsidy and Nevada’s timesheet verification, compressing time from kickoff to go-live from months to weeks, Prabhu explained.

“By embedding AI into the systems, we are not only making the systems faster, but we are also making the customer journey more empathetic,” Prabhu said. “While we hear that AI might replace the human touch, what I would submit to you is: Isn’t AI the key to bring it back? Technology is doing the heavy lifting and people can focus on people.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next:

(* Disclosure: Deloitte sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Deloitte nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE