Case study · Healthcare and Life Sciences

Putting AI to work for a strong sales team

How a large health plan’s proposal team adopted AI and built use cases to compete for more business

A large health plan’s growth and proposal teams compete for major contracts. Our job was to help them use AI in that work: get it adopted by the experts writing and reviewing proposals, apply it to use cases drawn from live pursuits, and use it to help the team compete for more.

A large health plan

At a glance

Client

A large health plan

Industry

Healthcare and Life Sciences

Offerings

Platform Activation, Custom Agent and Workflow Build, Training and Enablement

Stage

Active build

The challenge

Having AI tools was not helping the team reach its goals.

Proposal work meant long, interlocking documents, which general-purpose assistants struggle with out of the box.

What we did

Use cases from live pursuits, through two platform changes

01
Built use cases from live pursuits
Training and Enablement
We ran working sessions with the proposal team to find where AI would help most, then built for those jobs: compliance checks across a full submission, mock scoring of past responses against evaluation criteria, comparisons of competitors’ bids, and review of draft responses before submission.
02
Kept adoption going through two platform changes
Platform Activation
The organization decided to standardize on Copilot and needed help moving off a prior AI tool, along with training and enablement on Copilot. For a small group whose work needed more capability, we helped them adopt Cowork as an additional option.
03
Put AI to work on real deals
Custom Agent and Workflow Build
For large procurements, we built a long-document analysis capability that breaks an RFP into the right questions and reports across proposals, evaluations, and source materials. We also set up the team’s tools and workflows ahead of a major upcoming procurement, so it can respond quickly when the RFP is released.

What we learned

Three lessons from the proposal work

Adoption came from live deals.

The team took up AI quickly where it solved a problem on a deal already in progress.

Plan for the platform to change.

Enterprise AI standards change, as they did here. A team with core AI fluency can switch platforms when it needs to.

Start from what the team needs.

The teams began with what they needed done, then worked out how to get it from the tools.

The outcome

Ready for the next procurement

The proposal team kept using AI through two platform changes.
The team has a set of proposal use cases built from real opportunities: compliance checks, mock scoring, contract comparisons, and draft review.
The team can compare long-form documents.
The team’s tools and workflows are ready for the next procurement.

For your organization

To win more health insurance business, a team has to pursue more bids without lowering the quality of any one of them.